Hooray for Road Trips!

Okay, so off I go in a new direction.  Figuratively and literally. And it’s all about the classic American road trip. Yes, we’ve done a few.  In all four corners of this great country of ours.  And across the middle too.  And that is the one I will start with.  This was a while back when my husband had retired and to celebrate we decided to take a trip across the USA in our camper.

Research and planning began in earnest as we considered which places we’d most like to see on this six week adventure. I picked several places and Bob picked out a couple too (although truth be told, he’s all about the driving.)  You will never guess what they were.  No really, you wouldn’t.  Now you have to remember that we are from the Great Northwest and thus are not easily impressed by other places.  Why?  Well, Mt. Rainier for one. And Olympic National Park.  And Puget Sound where killer whales frolic. Okay, I rest my case.

But my point is, I’ve already seen all that. So I wanted to see the anti-northwest.  I wanted to see where it’s completely flat and the skies are threatening and Dorothy saw the twister in the Wizard of Oz.   And I wanted to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway through the Appalachians where Catherine Marshall’s ‘Christy’ lived and served and loved. And how about Dutch country in Lancaster? And the worn down colorful Adirondacks in upstate NY?  So these were some of my choices, which as it turns out didn’t leave Bob much room to pick.  Other than we knew we were heading to Virginia to visit our daughter and the boys.  But as I said earlier, he is happy just to do the driving.  In fact, in the entire trip across the USA I think I drove one hour somewhere in Indiana.

So planning began in earnest.  Because that’s what I do.  I’m a planner. Heaven forbid if we should do something that was not in my itinerary. (Although some spontaneity did accidentally creep in here and there.)  Here’s the map of the journey on one side and the itinerary on the other.  Doesn’t it look fun?  Don’t you wish you could go?  Me too!

In case you can’t see clearly from my rickety old scrap book, this trek started from the Pacific Northwest, through the Rockies, across the Midwest on I 70 (yep, right through Kansas),  over and down and up again on the Blue Ridge Parkway to Virginia, through Pennsylvania, New York, with a left at Niagra Falls, then west through Chicago on I 90 until home.  Whew!  I’m tired already.  So I’ll share some highlights of this journey in my next blog post (or two or three or…)  thanks for coming along.

~  Susanne