Drove to Las Vegas and back from Canada ...loved it.

We just got back from a trip to Las Vegas and couldn't ask for a better ride. We both found the seats very comfortable for 15 hrs at a time sitting. I took the rear seat out and out of angle iron built a platform (bed) for our two goldens. It was big enough for my wife and the two dogs to sleep on. I slepted on the passenger seat. It was pulled forward a bit and tilted back some. Not like a bed but OK for a short sleep. It was -3c about 26f when we slept, but I put the emergency brake on (to cancel the DRL) and turned the car on, set the climate control to 22c (70f) and the car started roughly every 15 minites for about one minite. kept us nice and toasty.
Now we didn't drive for fuel economy, as we had mountain passes and wind to boot. We drove about 3mph over the speed limit, fastest was 80 mph (130 kmh) over all we averaged 39.8 mpg according to fuelly.
Where we live in BC to Vegas area only was $97.00 to get there. I know the mileage could have been better as we have the v touring which it about the same as v5 w/o atp.
Those 50 series tires handled great on all the corners and the roads are in much better (smoother) shape in the USA. We had no complaintes at all.

 

Thanks it wasn't hard.
We went with the traffic flow for speed. the hardest part was slowing down to 25 mph through the small towns, like Fallon and Winnemucca NV. We drove to Baker CA. on the 127 from Death Valley Junction for lunch and in Shoshone Ca. the gas was 5.17 per gal, we kept driving all day and fueled up in Pahrump Nv. @ $3.599
Pic: Death Valley National Park (funeral mountains in background) from the Nevada side. A jogger was looking at Prius when I took the pic.

 

Here are a couple more.

 

The bed that I put in is 68 inches to the end of the plywood. I did it like that because I wanted the front seats to be all the way back and be able to recline them also. I used 3/4 in birch plywood the 3" foam that was 3x5ft high density from Home D. in the States. I used two pieces of foam then covered with a packing blanket. The plywood sloped up about 3 degrees and was flush at the back. It is very solid and is bolted to where the seats were bolted.


We drove from just out of Cranbrook BC and followed hwy 95 about 75% of the time. I left work at 3:30pm got home and we left by 4pm, drove 'till 10:30pm slept for 4 hrs woke up at 2:30 am and drove untill 7:30 pm. It took 23.5 hrs driving not including sleeping time. The other pics I have are of us painting the foreclosure that we bought.

 

Just measured it again 68" to the end of the plywood. We could have made it longer but I wanted to tilt the seats back for relaxing.

 

Usually we park on BLM land as we don't like the noise and diesel smell of the Big-rigs. We have stayed in quieter rest areas, but we never stay close to the 8 hr limit. If no BLM land found at the time, we pull onto desolite rural roads and this way our golden retreivers always have a place to run. To wash up we hit rest areas, truck stops, homedepot/lowes or walmarts. And if we travel more than 2 days we find a Motel 6, as all accept pets. You can say we have been doing this for almost 25yrs (in different vehicles) and never had any problems throughout the US. Been from WashingtonDC, Florida Keys, Padri Island and all along the West coast. We have also rarely stayed in a paid campground.

 

BLM is the same as our Crown Land. BLM stands for Bureau of Land Management.