The details of the trip are really coming together now. We have scheduled a departure date of Thursday July 3rd, 2008 with a total of 25 different hotels needed over the course of our journey. This is based on staying one night in each location with the exception of 3 major stops where we’ll spend two nights in each of those. This means our trip will consist of a total of 28 nights on the road if everything goes according to plan….or if we don’t decide to change the plan along the way. So, if you plot all this on the calendar, then we expect to be back home on Thursday July 31st, 2008.
The planned overnight stops consist of the following places and some of the way points to be covered on those days. The major stops are bolded and each stop is commented with things we’ll pass getting there:
- Perrysburg, OH – Outside of Toledo focused on getting a bit west
- Elgin, IL – West of Chicago and still focused on covering some miles westward
- Sioux City, IA – The “Field of Dreams” and the Lincoln Highway
- Hot Springs, SD – Ashfall Fossil Beds and Black Hills National Forest
- Deadwood, SD – Mount Rushmore
- Cody, WY – Lots of cool mountains and not much else
- Jackson Hole, WY – Yellowstone and Grand Teton
- Boise, ID – Craters of the Moon and more mountains and valleys
- Portland, OR – Multnomah Falls and Wahkeenah Falls
- Newport, OR – This is via Cannon Beach, OR on the Pacific Ocean
- Gold Beach, OR – Oregon Dunes and Prehistoric Garndens
- Eureka, CA – Giant Redwoods
- Santa Rosa, CA – Just north of San Francisco
- Half Moon Bay, CA – staying at a nice resort on the Ocean
- Monterey, CA – Making our way down the Pacific Coast Highway
- Pismo Beach, CA – We’ll drive Big Sur this day
- Los Angeles, CA – Beverly Hills shopping and Hollywood, etc.
- Needles, CA – Picking up Route 66 this day across California towards the desert
- Flagstaff, AZ – Grand Canyon
- Albuquerque, NM – Meteor Crater
- Amarillo, TX – Midpoint Cafe and Cadillac Ranch
- Tulsa, OK – National Route 66 Museum and Edmund, OK
- Saint Louis, MO – Maramec Caverns and the Gateway Arch
- Bowling Green, KY – Corvette Museum and Plant, Elizabethtown, KY too.
- Cherleston, WV – Onward home after staying here
And that is pretty much it! – The main task now is selecting a majority of the hotels for planned stops. Right now the mapping software says this trip is going to be 7388 miles and take 150 hours to drive. I expect this to get slightly shorter as the various stops are tweaked up.
