Buying and insuring a car in the US for a roadtrip

Upvote:2

$2000 is not enough to buy a van that you could rely on for a long trip. Are you a mechanic?
Registering it might be a problem: you probably have to be a resident of the state. On the other hand, if the van has plates, you can just drive it on those plates and sell it to used-car place when you are done.
American insurance is only good in the US and Canada. You would need to get special insurance in Mexico (they sell it at little shops along the border).
A lot of Mexico and Central America is... sketchy. It is not particularly rare for a tourist to come home in a body-bag. Or several separate body-bags.
As a Brit, you may not have a good sense of just how big North America is. Land's End to John o' Groats is 1400 km. The equivalent journey in the US would be from Marathon, Florida, to Anchor Point, Alaska, 8500 km. The US is forty times larger than the UK, so six months in the US is less than five days in Britain. Canada is bigger still (although largely empty).

Michael Lorton 8672

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