"Who cares, I have an infinite amount of money" - Bill Gates.To bad, but that's not the case for my brother and me. Since we both are students, we had to make the trip as inexpensive (not cheap) as possible whitout missing the essentials. This means that we didn't want to spend money on unnecessary things and at the same time didn't want to save money where it hurts. This is a very subjective definition. For some people sleeping in a tent in a national forest without possibility of getting a shower every morning is not worth the $30 savings (compared to a cheap motel room) - for us it was. On the other hand we decided not to skip places like Disneyland "just" because the admission is $31 (+ $6 parkinfee), which by the way is horrible expensive, but pretty normal priced for a whole-day-adventure-park in the US.
The two major records on the budget are food and the overnight expenses. If you can cut these down, you're very good going. We accomplished this by:
Buying food at big supermarkets (filosophy: the bigger the cheaper). Since we are not much of cooks, for dinner we mostly chose the simple just-to-be-heated "spaghetti-cans" (ravioli, tortelini, spaghetti with meatsauce and so forth; when you get realy advanced you can proceed to the chinese 2-in-1 cans where one just has to add instant rice - tastes great) instead of the more advanced stuff. At the end of our trip we got pretty tired of can-food and started eating at fast-food places (Taco Bell is our absolute favourite) - somehow it seems to be impossible to live in the US without getting kind of addicted to fast-food. It's so convienient, cheap and ... of course fast, but not nearly as healthy as ravioli-cans :-). For inbetween (we never realy had a set lunch-time, but eat when we were hungry) we often eat sandwiches (wonderbread, lattice(?) & tomatoes, salami, chees, miracle-whip) for this purpose we had bought a coolingbag and a cooling element that was "recharged" whenever we came near a freezer. Apples, Oranges, Bananas and other fruits also were very common in our diet
Make friends through the internet
Camping in national forests
Motorcycle vs. car: car is probably a LOT cheaper, but ...
Telephonecards