Cheap flights

Cheap flights

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Road Trip Blogger

Road Trip Blogger

Fiat 500: A Road Trippers Review

Posted: 18 Apr 2014 12:26 PM PDT

If you've been following along with our recent blogs, you'll know that we went down to Portland for a few days. During this past trip, we ended up renting a Fiat 500 from Enterprise Rent a Car. This was quite the little compact car, perfect for 2 people on a short road trip.

In this week's blog, we share with you our thoughts on a Fiat 500 as a road trip car. This is the perfect little car for a short road trip; it's great on gas and fun to drive. My car back home generally costs about $55 to fill up (2013 Honda Civic), where this Fiat 500 only costs $30 to fill up (lighter engine and smaller tank). A great savings when driving long kms.


If you're like me and you have trouble packing light, be warned that not only is the trunk very small, but the backseat is almost non-existent. To be honest, I'm not sure how 4 people could actually fit in this car as the backseat acts more of a shelf than seats. After all, it is a compact car.

As far as the overall handling of the car is concerned, it's a great little car. There are of course little things in the car that I wasn't a fan of. I disliked having the gear shift so predominant in the centre console of the car as I hit it a few times while picking my drink up from the cup holder. I really missed having the radio volume control on the steering wheel (I have it in my own car). Lastly, I found it extremely hard to do a shoulder check from the driver's side of the car, as the back window was more frame then window.



Our thoughts on Enterprise Rent a Car:
This is the first time we've rented a car before, and what great service/experience this was. We had the car for several days and we were able to obtain a "weekend special" rate. I love that Enterprise is encouraging weekend road trips, and giving out better pricing on weekends. What better way to put 5,000 kms on a car in a few days then a rental car … and for only $40/each.

We did call several other rental car places for pricing before choosing to go with Enterprise. Several other car rental places charged substantial fees to take their cars "out of country" to Portland, and Enterprise was the only place we found that offered unlimited kms. This worked perfect for us!

When it came down to price, the Fiat 500 was the perfect rental car for a 3 day road trip. If price weren't an option, what would be your perfect road trip car? Leave your comment below!

Beer, Hiking and Tacos: Our Road Trip to Portland

Posted: 18 Apr 2014 10:49 AM PDT

This was an exciting weekend for us as we celebrated a fellow road trippers 30th birthday in Portland, and it was St Patrick's day!


We started off our road trip adventures at the Columbia River Gorge. Geared up and ready for a breathtaking 2 hour hike, we stopped over at Multnomah Falls for a loop hike. Sadly, we learned that a fallen rock had broken off a portion of the Multnomah Falls bridge, leaving the bridge closed and us unable to complete the loop hike. We spent the afternoon exploring the different falls accessible from the road way, with a small hike up the to the Multnomah Falls bridge.


While exploring, we stumbled across the Oneonta Gorge. How exciting! This is an amazing hike we're looking forward to doing this summer!

After exploring the Columbia River Gorge area and falls, we were left quite hungry and used TVFoodMap.com to map out a Mexican food restaurant. We drove down to Vancouver, Washington for Don's Taco Shop. Amazing food! After lunch, we headed back to our hotel in Oswago Lake for an afternoon nap. Later that evening we ventured down to Kells Irish Pub in Portland for a St Patrick's day celebration. Surprisingly, we were quite disappointed in the lack of St Patrick's day festivities in the pub. The pub itself was promoting St Patrick's day events all weekend long, but no one in the pub was dressed in green, drinking green beer or rocking any St Patrick's day attire.

The following morning we nursed our St Patrick's day hangover, then off we went to spent the day exploring downtown Portland. We stood in a 30 minute lineup outside Voodoo Doughnuts, excited to try their delicious donuts and experience their unique donut culture. We were quite surprised to see such a long lineup outside, but do to their unique nature; this isn't unusual for this little donut shop. We tried their fruitloops donut, voodoo donut, lemon donut, apple fritter donut, and maple bacon donut. Needless to say, we felt terrible after eating so many donuts … but they were so good we couldn't help ourselves.


After a few days, we had to make our way home. We decided to drive home up the Oregon coast, beautiful views along the way. Just outside Astoria, we stopped to explore a 1906 shipwreck from Peter Iredale.


Have you spent some time on Portland or explored Peter Iredale's 1906 shipwreck? If so, we'd love to hear from you. Leave your comment below and share your travel story with us.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)