Peter Ibrahim wrote:
At first glance, local company FOX looked quite cheap, however their cost of
CDW jacked the price up quite a lot. Avis' quote included unlimited
mileage, without having to worry about what states we could/could not enter,
and included 'additional drivers insurance' or something along those lines,
which I believe was similar to CDW.

Beware "additonal insurance" is NOT the same as CDW. It usually just offers
higher limits than your normal insurance. CDW is a racket but is a necessity
if your credit card doesn't cover it (and CC don't cover 'loss of use' but
it's better than nothing). It seems that all car rental companies are primarily
in the insurance business.

Enterprise was the most expensive out
of the lot, it appeared that you pay the underage drivers fee per each
underage driver, which meant very little savings with multiple people. Have
not heard of Trailfinders, will check them out!

Checkout orbitz.com, it shows a concise matrix of all companies and all their
car class and the cost.

As far as radios are concerned I had a Taurus from Payless in Denver back
in September (Ford Granada size) and it came with a radio and CD player.
Given the distances I would suggest that with 3/4 of you anything smaller
would be a false economy.

Don't rely on just a radio if you need something to listen to. 3 days of
nothing but the single country music station is enough to drive you over
the many cliffs in the southwest :-)

My biggest concern was where we'd fit all our luggage, and given the
relatively inexpensive cost of upgrading to a larger size car, I think we'll
get something with room to spare. I've not seen anywhere any options for
manual drive instead of automatic drive - have you come across this option
at all? None of us have ever driven automatics before, and what with having
to get used to right-lane driving, would be nice to have a system of driving
we're used to. Otherwise we should probably practice with automatics a
little in Britain before we go.

It'll take you all of 5 minutes to get used to an automatic.

Zeyd