Well, I'm at it again . . . Spring is here and we've got the travel bug once more. I decided to share with my readers my methods for planning a road trip using the upcoming one as my model.
I decided that I'd like to complete the trip I started back in 2012, the one I titled "Smoke!" due to the fact that wildfires to the west of my travel area obscured the scenery to a point where the visibility was reduced to less than five miles. I threw in the towel early on that trip to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. Those were now my farthest destinations for this year's trip.
With a couple of places in mind, my next step was to determine how to get from here to there. If it were only myself, I would probably do as I did before; fly to Salt Lake City and rent a car for a week. But Judy is going with me this time, and she refuses to fly - a sad result of 9/11, but one I am unable to dispel, so we will drive the whole way there and back.
Since it takes four days to get to western Wyoming, and another four to get back here to eastern Georgia, a full week will be spent in just driving to the starting point. We've both seen most of the sights along the major routes, so my itinerary is going to take us over some unfamiliar roads out and back. For instance, I plan to drive I-80 across Nebraska instead of I-70 across Kansas.
The next stage was to check out hotels along the route to provide lodging at 600 mile intervals for the long haul and shorten that to about 300 for the sight-seeing portion. The major chains I try to use are Choice and Wyndham Hotels, because I earn points toward reward nights. I couldn't reserve rooms, since we had not yet settled on a definite date to start out, but I could check on approximate prices around the time we wanted to go.
Once I had a route and some hotels chosen it was time to decide what we wanted to see along the way besides the two aforementioned parks. I had already decided to include another stop in Moab, Utah, one of my favorite places, and we were both up for another trip to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado, so we have already planned on at least five national parks. You would think that would be more than enough, but I like to plan on more than 'more than enough' just in case weather foils some of our plans.
This is where two of my favorite internet planning tools come into play. I use Google Earth to find places along the route that others have found interesting enough to include pictures denoted by those little yellow squares you see on the map. An hour or two of search and display gives me lots of possible sights to see. Then a visit with another site, roadtripamerica.com (to which I have contributed a lot of routes and Road Trip Attractions) gives me even more places of interest. In all, I have about thirty possible places to see. Now all we have to do is lock in the dates and make the reservations.
Do I try to view too many sights and sites on my road trips? Sure I do, but then, I return to many of them, so I eventually see and do everything. For example, this will be my fourth trip into Yellowstone. Each time I visit different areas there. The seasons and the weather are different, and it's like a completely different park. In my opinion, it's a better way to see the complete park.
