Making Plans

Greeley, Colorado

We are in full on planning mode for our epic summer/ early fall road trip. Starting in November, we hope to travel fairly slowly, staying in place for weeks and even months at a time, but the next few months aren't going to play out that way. Between now and October, we will be visiting 8 states and at least as many national parks, attending one family reunion, picking up two returning missionaries, and dropping off two students at college.

We started the planning process months ago, discussing with the kids where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. The overwhelming opinion was that they wanted to visit National Parks. A few specifically: Redwoods, Sequoia and Yosemite. We also knew we needed to start from Idaho where we would be spending July 4th with our big kids. So, working from eastern Idaho, we began to plot our trip.

While we have planned many shorter family trips over the years, this trip is way more extensive than we have previously done. Still the process is similar. Typically Kris and I work through our plans using google maps, google calendar, and airbnb.

First we plotted a trip that would take us through the places we wanted to go. There was a lot of tweaking involved as we checked mileage and hours of driving between destinations. We have to balance our desire to not drive more than about 5 hours in a day with a certain amount of urgency to get to everywhere we want to be in what is a fairly limited amount of time. We also are not crazy about too many one night stays, because that means a hotel, and, especially since with six people that requires two rooms, that is the most expensive way we can stay. So, most days have 5 hours or less of driving. Some do not.

Next step was the calendar. We started by putting in the places we had to be at certain times: family reunion, picking up RM #1, dropping kids at college, picking up RM #2. Then we could fill in the time in between with our other stops. We had to make lots of decisions about where we would stay longer and where we would essentially drive through. Sometimes we had to sacrifice a few places or things because we just would not have enough time to see it all right now. That is when we remind ourselves that this isn't our one and only chance ever to see the state of Oregon. Which is good, because Oregon is getting seriously short changed on this initial trip.

Then it was time for airbnb. In our enthusiasm we went to airbnb too early with our first destination and planned a week long stay before we really had all our dates right and had to re configure after looking more closely at our calendar. Oops. Kris is primarily the airbnb guy. He finds houses in the locations we are looking at, we review them together, he contacts the renters and secures the location. Airbnb is pretty user friendly. Type in where you want to go, when you want to be there, and how many people you need room for and it will produce a list of available properties. You can sort further by number of bedrooms or bathrooms, internet, swimming pools, price, etc. While airbnb does not give you addresses of the properties, it does give you an approximate area on google maps, so it is at least fun to head to google earth and see if you can find the house, plus it gives you a good idea of the neighborhood.

After several evenings of working through this we now have a pretty good idea where we will be sleeping through about October 15th, which is really good because as of last week we really did not and that was weighing pretty heavily on our minds. Our car is just not adequate for all of us to sleep in, especially when three of us are teenage boys.