For folks flying out-of-state and country and planning on renting a car, I have some advice that I learned the hard way — DO the research and really try to line up a rental before hand if you can. I toured Central America with my boyfriend’s family a few years back — he’s Guatemalan-American — and the public transportation there is about as un-green as you can get. Furthermore, there’s not (or wasn’t at that time) much of a market for hybrids so you couldn’t rent one of those either. We could argue about the differences between carbon footprint in the third world vs. a consumer-culture like the US, but I’m sorry, I’m not comfortable driving an SUV in pretty much any circumstances (plus, you don’t wanna spend tons of $ on gas on vacation, you want something small you can zip up to the beach in and back!).

Anyway, we’re planning another trip now so I’m doing my homework, looking up cars on the EPA website and other tools like http://www.carfunfootprint.com (the latter is neat because it scores cars on both emissions ratings and their cool factor…so basically I can see which of the lower end 4-cylinder Toyotas that I wanna rent has the most sex appeal, lol). I’m also trying to work it out so that as little driving will be done as possible, but then I risk getting locked in one location. It’s a hard balance to strike since vacation by nature NEEDS transportation.