Discussion: Looking for some travel advice...

Hi, I am coming from New Zealand for the world rogaine champs. A group of us are planning on heading to the US classic champs beforehand. I am coming over a little earlier than some of the others and looking for something to do for a few days before they arrive. I fly into Denver on the afternoon of August 3rd. Can anyone offer any advise on getting to this event/places to stay/taking part/finding transport around?

We are looking to rent a car for the US classic champs and travelling to the WRC. Any advice on the best place to rent cars (value for money etc) would also be appreciated.

Thanks

Georgia

My wife has got some great deals on car rentals at Priceline.com. I haven't done it myself but I think the website will give you a price for the rental but than she somehow offers them quite a bit less and they sometimes take it. The car rental itself will be with one of the major carriers (Hertz, budget, avis, etc) but the price is through priceline.

In Laramie, most folks who camp stay at the Yellow Pine national forest campground. Eat, shower, and use the internet in town after the events.

Lots of relatively inexpensive lodging options in Laramie, too.

I haven't checked prices but Alamo and National tend to be a little more reasonably priced rental cars in some cities. Also, link through the Orienteering USA website for a discount on Hertz.

Denver car rental prices for that period are very high across the board.

I noticed what JJ reported. I've never seen rental car prices this high, anywhere. I am on the fence about being able to pull off the trip or not, and the high rental car prices (combined with pretty high air fares, when I last checked) may unfortunately tip things towards not deciding to go ...

Is it cheaper to go into Colorado Springs?

If you rent at the airport, you have to pay airport taxes and duties - it costs much more. If you can get to one of the downtown rental locations, it can be less than half the airport cost. I think a cab or bus to downtown should be do-able.

If you're a AAA member (or CAA or even the NZ auto club!) you can often get good discounts via the auto club website. Though we rented a car through Dollar last time we were in Denver, and had a TERRIBLE experience. Never, ever again!

Also, if you're headed north from the airport, be aware there's a nasty surprise in the form of a toll road. Which you have to have a transponder for! You can rent one from your rental car place, but it will cost you a small fortune ($16/day at Dollar). If you don't have a transponder and go through the toll road anyway, they will photograph your license and bill the company, which will then bill you along with an extra fee - which adds up to something in the neighborhood of $40. There is a way to go on local roads and avoid the fee, but it's annoying. The whole thing is a terrible racket and I get completely pissed off every time we visit Denver and rent a car.

Also, the rental car places will try to convince you to upgrade to a V6 if you're going into the mountains. You really don't need that.

Flying from Toronto, Colorado Springs (with a Denver layover) is about half the price of a Denver flight.

@Abizeleth -- sorry to hear about your experiences with Dollar. I'm not sure that is unique to the Denver airport. I've had my own issues with Dollar at other locations. As for the toll road, if you're heading south to the US Champs, it's a non-issue -- you don't need the toll road for that. If you're heading north to Laramie Daze (which everyone should do :-) ), it's quite simple to take the airport road to I-70, head west for about 5 miles, and then north on I-270 to I-25 north. That's what the locals do...we avoid the toll road, too!

Allow me to put in a plug for the City of Denver...one of our more enjoyable cities. Dispense with the rental car for a day or so, and just take a bus to one of many inexpensive hotels within walking distance of Larimer Square and the surrounding downtown area.

Lots of shopping, restaurants, entertainment, breweries with tap rooms, are within walking distance. And don't miss seeing the Brown Palace which dates from the mining days. They serve a great breakfast, and their afternoon tea should make a New Zealander feel right at home.

From there you can rent a bike, or use Denver's bike sharing program for transportation over the hundreds of miles of bike paths throughout Denver...much cheaper and more fun than paying tolls and sitting in traffic. Denver also has light rail, a good transit system, and is a Amtrak hub for train travel to both coasts out of newly-restored Union Station...a nice alternative to air travel: more picturesque, cheaper, and no long TSA security lines to negotiate.

And when you finally decide to rent a car, downtown car rental rates may be quite a bit less than out at the distant airport. And don't forget, we drive on the RIGHT! :-)

It's possible to take a connecting flight from Denver to Laramie. Depending on which carrier you're using to fly to Denver with, and particular booking dates, the connecting flight can be quite cheap. Or pricier. Even if you can't get a super cheap connection, it's possible you might still win out on savings from car rentals in Laramie versus Denver.

But unless you're planning to Daze in Laramie, none of that will make any sense. ; )

Just checked car rental prices -- from July 31 to Aug. 7 (to go to the Daze of course!).

Best price at the airport was $459 for economy sized car (that was Advantage -- all other places were $660 or higher!).

Best price in the city of Denver was $205 (Enterprise), most places were around $300. So Gavin is certainly correct about better prices away from the airport.

Even if you are going to LDaze, I would recommend at least investigating COS (CO Springs airport) as an option. The airfare might be a bit more, but a cheaper rental could offset it. It's also much more convenient than schlepping to DEN after the Classic Champs.

As for E-470, the rental car transponder fee is more in the range of $3-5/day -- not inlcuding tolls. Would be nice if they accepted E-ZPass -- and by Oct 1, 2016, they will, because all electronic toll collection will have to be interoperable, nationwide, by that date.

The worst feature of car rentals in the States and Canada is their cost of insurance. It usually is over $20 per day. (pro rated it's $7000+ per annum)
We can get around it by using a credit car that insures us for cars rented in Canada or the States or by getting a rider on our own car insurance. Before you leave NZ see if you can get similar coverage.
I haven't yet had an accident with a rental car but my credit card (VISA) has paid for a damaged headlamp caused by a stone thrown up on a road and for over $3000 worth of hail damage. Hail storms and gravel roads are fairly common where you will be going.

There is one major hole in VISA and MasterCard's insurance, and it is exclusion of coverage for driving off pavement. Not off road, but off pavement. This exclusion applies worldwide. How many times was there a paved parking lot at your favorite event? I'd say less than half the time. Most damage to cars happens when parking. When you (or the peace officer taking the report) provide the location of the incident, the fact will come out, and the internets are full of stories of coverage denied by VISA and MasterCard.

Rental car companies' LDWs also exclude off-pavement driving in some U.S. states. If they do at your chosen place of rental, you are down to your personal car insurance if it happens to (a) cover damage to rentals and (b) cover off-pavement. If not, you pay for the damage out of your own pocket. Keep this in mind when deciding whether or not purchasing an LDW makes sense.

Good point Vlad!

@ kissy - agreed, Dollar is an issue in lots of places not just Denver. They lure you in with the low rates, and then charge you extra for all kinds of things. Like the $16/day transponder fee. Our AAA agent actually tells people to avoid them, even though they have a relationship with AAA! In our case, we were given a car with a bad tire and then treated extremely rudely when we tried to get them to fix it. I filed a claim with them, and a year later it's still unresolved.

One of my friends was in Denver over the weekend, and just reported a new issue with rental cars out of the Denver airport - she returned her car to Hertz and was slapped with a $100 fee to remove the smell of marijuana from the car. She does not smoke, has never smoked and no one smoked in the car while she had it. She was treated pretty badly by the company and they seemed to go out of their way to try to embarrass her into just paying the fee. So you may want to be sure to turn on the A/C and make sure the car doesn't smell before you leave the rental car lot...

I will say that I love Colorado and have lived there several times, and my parents live there. We visit there often. So I'm not knocking the state. :) But the car rentals at the Denver airport can be pretty awful. I would agree with the advice of picking up a car downtown if you can.

Heck I smelled marijuana in the corridors of DEN airport food court the last time I changed planes there. How the heck do they expect to keep it out of the rental cars? I smell scam in need of serious investigation!

The car rental agencies should just start marketing the smell as a feature, part of the "Welcome to Colorado!" package.

I rented from Advantage out of Denver once. I've had pretty good experiences with them. They have a lot of SUVs in their fleet; I got a free upgrade to an SUV in San Diego once because that was all they had. Nice since I was headed to Anza-Borrego.

Georgia, you can find a list of Laramie-area activities & attractions at our event site from 2012: http://2012.rmoc.org/index.php/travel-a-lodging/ac...

*Warning -- that site is two years old, so some of the links might be broken. But, it'll give you an idea of what you can do to entertain yourself outside of the daily Laramie Daze O-courses. The Dining link might be useful, too. :-)

by Oct 1, 2016, they will, because all electronic toll collection will have to be interoperable, nationwide, by that date.

Will they have to be compatible with both SI and Emit?

@JJ: No, but SI & Emit will have to be compatile with each other...

:-D

It looks like some folks might have to change their travel plans for Laramie Daze because at the moment the secret approach is out. Well, it's not so much that it's "secret" but rather it's unless you know about it, you probably don't know about it. Kind of like ordering off the "secret" menu at In-N-Out.

For folks out of the region, probably the most popular and obvious way to travel to Laramie Daze is to fly to Denver, and then hop into a car and drive up. That's also the secret approach, except that instead of driving up to Laramie and then stopping, you zip right on by and head to Yellowstone first. Once there, then you proceed to Firehole Lake Drive, and then first you drive around the drive counterclockwise, and then you do a flip and drive back along the drive clockwise. Finally, on your way out of the park, you stop at Isa Lake and jump in for a ritual pre-Daze cleansing. And then--the most critical part of all--you toss your compass in Isa Lake and see which way it drifts. If it drifts off towards the Pacific, then you throw that compass away (and you do *not* take it home with you and sell it off on Ebay to some unsuspecting buyer) because it's no good. If it drifts towards the Atlantic (well, Gulf of Mexico), then you're good to go and you drive to Laramie and get set to kick some Daze ass.

I can't remember when I first heard that folks were doing this, or who told me. It was either Jim Hall, or someone else saying that they had heard about it from Jim Hall. Or maybe it had nothing to do with Jim at all. When working with secrets sometimes it can hard to be sure. Where is the NSA when you really need them?

Anyway, it's out this year, and that's the main point. The problem is that the aptly named Firehole Lake Drive has melted, so that's a no-go, for the time being.

If you don't believe Swampfox here is the story.

Good news for the modern Laramie Daze orienteer: Firehole Lake Drive has been repaired and is now back open for business. Of course, that doesn't mean it can't melt down all over again. As some fans around Wyoming like to point out: "Shyatt happens."