To Plan or Not to Plan

Logistics isn’t the most interesting of topics, but we feel working out the logistics is necessary for any successful long trip. Some people can just take off on vacation and plan things as they go - where to stop, what to see, where to stay - but that really isn’t us. A certain level of spontaneity is definitely a good thing, but our experience is that lack of planning will cause you to waste time, miss experiences and end up staying in some pretty lousy places. Case in point: one night on a trip to Italy where we didn’t have a reservation and couldn’t find a hotel on the road until very late.

This is all a prelude to me saying that we have now finished planning our trip. We started talking about the trip at least six months ago and things are now basically finalized as of yesterday. By that I mean specifically we now have hotel reservations for every night that we aren’t staying with relatives. Each day is planned so that we don’t have any excessively long drives and we have a list of sightseeing that we want to do. Our typical road day will be about 5 hours of driving wrapped around a couple of hours of sightseeing along the way. The longest stretch is 9 hours between Las Vegas and San Jose.

As a brief outline, we will take a more southern route to California and a more northern route on the return home. We will be 38 days on the road with 27 hotel or motel nights, with many of them at the Hilton family of hotels – Hilton Garden, Hampton Inn, Doubletree, etc. This isn’t the cheapest option but since we are still gold members at Hilton, it brings perks at many of the stops and we know that the quality of the room will be decent. We also have a couple of interesting other reservations including a ski resort in Taos and the Old Faithful Inn and Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel in Yellowstone and that should at least be different and interesting.

The total mileage on the trip is going to be a little more that 7500 miles and take us through 23 states: Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

We’ll talk about this in subsequent posts, but there are a couple of unplanned themes which we discovered we had in our trip. One theme is National Parks. The big ones on our list are three in southern Utah (Arches, Bryce and Zion) and then Grand Teton and Yellowstone on the way back. Another theme is “Americana.” If you are going to discover America, this is a must. I know this will sound stupid, but we want to see the world’s largest ball of twine, the New Mexico State Fair, the remnants of Route 66 and other things like that. Another common theme is “The Old West” with stops at Indian pueblos and trading posts and a chuck wagon ride in Jackson Hole. The final theme is sampling “regional foods” such as St. Louis and Kansas City BBQ, New Mexico green chilies, and Navaho fry bread.

Opening Blog

We are about two months from our cross country trip and nearly a year into its planning. We intend to do blog postings as we go along so our friends and family can follow us along the way. Stay tuned for more postings as we get closer to leaving.