Traveling long distances is not feasible for everyone but, unfortunately, there really is no substitute for a campus visit. Of course I only have our experience to draw from but we visited ten schools (nine D3 and one D2) over about a year and some more than once. One local, one four hours away, the next closest (which happens to be the one he chose) an eight hour drive from us, and the rest 750-2200 miles (flew to the 2200 mi one). Six of the schools were handled on a summer road trip, which is obviously too late for you guys at this point. We were fortunate to have a ton of hotel points which made the financial pain much less but, suffice it to say, mom and dad both used basically all of our available vacation time to pull it all off. We knew fairly early in our son's high school career that he wanted to go far away for college so we had some time to prep for that. Also, our son's high school allowed excused absences for college visits so he just had to work ahead and bring a letter back from admissions at each school for days he missed. I'm always open to a PM if you'd like to bounce things around further. This thread had taken a slightly different turn from the original question and I have a very recent and vivid idea of what you're going through.