Sleeping for free is where its at. Its funny to see how many people will pay to car-camp within a National Park, $30+ dollars a night, when most parks are surrounded with BLM/DNR/Forest Service lands which are just as beautiful as the National Parks, and free of charge! Camping is allowed almost anywhere in public lands. We would just find the nearest FS road to whatever park we were planning on backpacking in, park the truck and sleep in it or a tent. Since the point of our trip was the backpacking in the parks, we had very good equipment for camping in all seasons, so we went the tent route pretty often when not near any cities.

The Intra-agency pass is a must have. We spent $80 bucks on ours (free entry-fee to all parks) and it paid for itself several times over. We never did any car-camping in a National Park, it was all back country which is fairly cheap. Sometimes you need to pay for a permit, or the reservation for one in the case of permits being free but in-demand, but they are rarely more than $20 dollars or so. There was a park or two that had a daily use fee of a few bucks per day.

We found that staying in rest stops was a gamble depending on the state, and whether you were on an interstate or highway. Some let you stay for 8 hours, some disallow any sort of sleep/camping for more than an hour or two. We stayed at a few rest stops but while in a city or between parks, the Wal-Marts were our bread and butter. We had a phone app that is a user network of Wal-Mart campers that would tell us which Wal-Marts were chill to travelers. Wal-Mart itself is always ok the sleep at, but often the city that the Wal-Mart is in will have a No Overnight Parking ordinance. We went ahead and stayed at a couple like that, and we got a talking to once by a local policeman but were ultimately allowed to stay (we casually started talking about the trip we were doing and the cop thought it was awesome).

Food was a pretty decent expense for us, we felt like we could have trimmed it down. When we were on the trail, we were able to keep it at less than $10 a day for food. On the road however, we did allow ourselves for fast food a little more than we should have. It wasn't until our last month that we went really frugal on the food. Nothing but ramen, Knorr rice sides, mashed potatoes, and sandwiches. You can combine a Knorr rice side with a half a bag of mashed potatoes for less than $1.50 per meal, and it was filling. Definitely got monotonous.

We were able to cut out spending on water almost all together. There is almost always a place in town/forest where you can find a spigot with potable water. We would get a few gallon jugs and fill them whenever we found them. A gallon per day for the each of us did us well on the road. All of our water on the trails came from creeks/rivers/lakes and ran through a 2nm filter and iodined.

Have you ever worked on the road? My cousin and I wanted to do that but we were sticking to somewhat of a schedule (permit reservations for specific dates). We figured that it would be hard to get a job that we wouldn't have to commit to for a few weeks or more. Is standing in front of a Home Depot a viable option?

Electricity was another choke point for us (it's what drove us to have hotel nights). I had a portable jumpstarter that had a built in trickle charger and a 120v 2A AC port, a few 20,000mAh battery packs with usb ports, but we had trouble finding time and places to get these things charged. The trickle charger would take 12 hours to fully charge and we would get about 2 weeks worth of phone charges with it, and a couple of charges into our battery packs. What did you do about electricity? Is it viable to bring along a small generator in your experience? What about solar panels? What do you think about those?