Really? I've heard it should be pretty easy, and that unless you're planning to fly often, renting is by far the best way to go (aside from just taking the airlines). Then again, my sources might not be all that knowledgable!

Renting is tough to use airplanes to take purposeful trips.

Flight schools (the overwhelming source of rental airplanes) don't want you taking their plane for 9 days (two weekends and the week in-between) and flying it 3-hours each way, or 6 total hours of rental for 9 days where they can't rent it to anyone else.

The typical minimum is 3 hours per day away from base.

Before I bought my twin-engine airplane, I wanted to have 50 hours of multi-engine time (to make insurance more affordable), and I rented a flight school twin to build that time, including some trips.

Because it was a twin (and therefore not in as high-demand), I was able to negotiate a 2-hour daily minimum, but that meant for long trips like Thanksgiving and Christmas, I had a lot of "extra hours" that I was going to have to pay for anyway, so I'd take side trips to fly off those hours (and to go visit used airplanes that I was considering purchasing).

It is also virtually impossible to decide "Hey, the weather looks good this weekend; I'd like to rent a plane all weekend and go to XYZ." The plane will be booked at some point during that weekend.

If you want to use an (non-airline, non-owned) airplane for travel, you want to join a partnership or a small club, not rent from flight schools. (This will be vastly cheaper than sole ownership, as you could imagine.)