For us, I always say that I (Kevin) love to plan vacations, I enjoy logistics and well, I'm an engineer so I ought to be good at problem solving. However, the planning for this trip was TOTALLY unlike anything we've done before. We must have talked and thought about it for about a year before we decided we would get serious. Our serious planning started about 7 months before we departed.
Although we had work to do to sell the house, decide what type of rig to buy and from whom, and all kinds of other decisions, I thought I'd take a minute to describe our route planning efffort.
We started with a goal to see as many of our Country's National Parks as possible.
Next, I thought about what time of year was ideal for visiting and how we might make that work without driving back and forth again and again through the course of the year.
The first challenge that I ran headlong into won't be a surprise to our outdoor loving followers - there just is NOT ENOUGH TIME TO SEE IT ALL IN ONE SHORT YEAR! Does that sound bizzare? It was eye-opening to me but it created a huge decision point for us. We decided it would be better to see fewer places for more time rather than to rush around from place to place, forgetting what we are living for. We felt packing more in would mean living the life we were hoping to escape from.
Based on these things, I decided that a clockwise trip around the country made the most sense. At other times of the year we joked that going counter-clockwise would be a pretty hilarious trip - imagine Death Valley in August, Washington in March, Minnesota in February... Sounds like a trip full of memories, eh?
So, anyway. The spreadsheet then morphed into a DAILY list of where we would wake up and go to sleep if all went according to plan. I'll admit that we knew we wouldn't live strictly according to this plan but it did a couple important things:
1. It helped us schedule dates at places that had to be booked WAY in advance. Think, Phantom Ranch at the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, etc. With a framework in place, we could book these parks with some comfort that we wouldn't be in Montana when we were booked in Moab...
2. We were able to realize that some things would need to give or we would go crazy. We dropped the central section of the California Coast (been there already at least), New England (sorry, Lobster lovers) and even favorites like Mount Rainier (Jenni almost cried) in favor of unexplored locales.
The spreadsheet was, in some places, populated with reservation information, places I thought we should stay or see, and other little details. I am sure we will continue to go back to this tool over the years when we want to remember the names of the roughly 90 campgrounds we visited.
As we encountered occasion to change our travel schedule, I had a great tool that I could use to see what would happen if we went one proverbial way or the other. We also used the tool to convey our plans to some of the friends and family we got to visit along the course of the year's journey.
This is one part of the trip that I would do very much the same way next time. That is, assuming we had a goal and a limited time to accomplish it. I envy those with a loose agenda and no end date but that was not our reality from the beginning and the planning gave us a tool to assure that we wouldn't mess up - at least without knowing it.
--Kevin