www.aaa.com
www.fuelcostcalculator.com

Are you planning a road trip this summer? AAA has always been a useful site for planning trips, complete with maps, hotel and car rental information, and vacation packages. Their best site, however, is their fuel cost calculator. It may not look like much, but it is easy to use. You type in the make, model, and year of your car, then put in your starting city and destination. The calculator factors in the average gas price and gives you an estimated total fuel cost. This is an especially good tool to help you decide whether it is more cost effective to drive or fly to your destination.

www.mezzoman.com

What is even cheaper than driving to your destination? Driving only halfway. Let’s say you and your friend from college want to meet for dinner and you live in neighboring states. Or you have two churches in different towns and you want to find a restaurant for a celebration between them. Mezzoman.com is an ingenious site that helps you find a meeting place in the middle. If you’re looking for a restaurant, you can choose the kind of food you’d like—options include Mexican, Indian, Greek, American, and more. It also will show you ice-cream places, coffee shops, movie theaters, or bowling alleys. The site uses Google maps, so the appearance is familiar. Look for this site to grow and become even more useful.

camping.about.com

camping.com

gocampingamerica.com

What can be more economical than pitching a tent? I recommend that you start at camping.about.com, then go to the others. Camping.about.com will help you look for campgrounds, and it contains user reviews on various places to stay, as well as ideas of where to camp and what to bring. I particularly liked its campground reviews. When you click on a state, you see a list of campsites with reviews by actual campers.

www.budgettravel.com

Budget Travel is a website and a magazine that includes ideas on road trips as well as adventure travels and trips to national parks. Main areas of this site are real deals, destinations, a how-to handbook, trip ideas, tips and experts, and tools. When you first come to this site don’t move on too fast, because in the big blue Budget Travel header they flash some great tips for budget travel. For example, “Switch computers when searching for flights.” Your computer stores information about your flight searches, but if you change computers the sites may see you as a new user again and give you new low fares. Do you need an idea for a trip? Check out “trip ideas,” which has links to solo travel, weekend getaways, family trips, road trips, and more. There is a family travel handbook here as well. It is worth reading and includes tips on travel with babies.

travel.yahoo.com/family

I like Google for everything including maps, but Yahoo!’s travel area is better, especially in regard to trip planning and travel advice. It’s great for vacations that involve air travel as well. Features in Yahoo! include travel guides, fare chase, deals, and much more. The travel guides area is particularly good when you are planning a trip. You can research 500,000 places to stay and things to do in more than 40,000 cities worldwide. I also love that Yahoo! saves your favorite places as well as your searches for flights and hotels in a custom trip plan so you can go back and search for cities you were thinking about last week or last year.

www.roadtripamerica.com/dashboarding/wi-fi-on-the-highway.htm

www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/3427551

A lot of truck stops (even in small rural towns), libraries, some state rest areas (including every one in Texas), as well as restaurants and coffee shops like Panera and soon Starbucks, have free Wi-Fi. Even some places like McDonald’s have it. Now you don’t even have to ask for directions when you are lost—just pull over and look it up online!

maps.google.com/help/maps/travel/index.html

Google maps are very powerful and allow you to do all kinds of fun things, from mapping a multiple-stop road trip to sharing all about your road trip with pins, video, and photos along the way. You can watch a demo to learn how to use these features.

gogreentravelgreen.com

As I was writing this Webwatch I learned that traveling by train is more environmentally friendly, or more green, than other forms of travel. You can learn about what “eco-tourism” or “sustainable travel” is by typing “definitions” into the search window here. This site is full of green travel tips for savvy travelers. While wandering around their site looking for posts on train travel I read this statement: “Many travelers want to be environmentally-conscious when they travel, but don’t want to go to extremes to be greener. With all of the options out there, how do you determine the extent to which you want to ‘go green’?”

One answer to that question involves how you get to your destination. As you make your travel plans, you can figure out the balance between saving money and being good to the environment. Sometimes eco-travel is frugal! If you are traveling, you will save money on gas if you have a hybrid car or if you take a train instead of driving. Learn more by searching “train” on this site.

www.intelligenttravel.typepad.com

This site is the National Geographic blog devoted to authentic and sustainable travel and was the winner of the best travel blog from Travvies in 2007. This blog is packed with great advice from all over the world and, like all things from National Geographic, they have gorgeous pictures!

services.google.com/earth/green

Have a green summer with Google’s go green site. There are five green tour videos in it that are worth a look. It is produced by Google and Earth Day Network. ❏