Dethroner Asks You: Cheap Long-Term, High-Mileage Car Rental?

One of the best things about being a writer is the ability to be fickle about what I’m doing and where I’m doing it. As long as I have an internet connection, I can work from almost anywhere. (The worst part about being fickle is that I’m often broke, or nearly.)

I don’t have a car, because I live in Brooklyn, and owning a car in New York is a real pain. But if I fly, I can’t take the dog; if I don’t take the dog, I have to pay a sitter. For any trip longer than a weekend, that is at least a couple hundred of dollars.

What I’d like to do is start renting cars for some long road trips, up to a couple of weeks at a time and over several thousand miles. (I’m thinking, if nothing else, of driving back home to Kansas City in a couple of months.) But every time I try to price out car rental that is long term yet high mileage, I can’t seem to find anything for less than a couple thousand dollars. My friends are incredulous, but can’t seem to offer any better suggestions.

I know that I’ll have to spend a fair chunk of change, but I can’t believe that renting a car for a week at a time would really be more expensive than buying two cross-country plane tickets. Is there some undiscovered method for getting deals on long-term rentals? At this point I’m starting to price out actually purchasing a car and paying a monthly car parking fee.