Obsessive Trip Planning

I'm in the midst of planning our big summer vacation. It's a road trip to Colorado and Wyoming and South Dakota. About 17 days of on-the-road fun.

I really love armchair traveling. I like reading about the places we're going to visit and figuring out all the options. We have an odd hybrid of traveling rigidly and traveling flexibly. I plan obsessively, and make a giant spiral bound book of all of our options. Then, when we're on the road, we have the option of picking and choosing the things we feel like doing.

When we're going to be somewhere where hotel rooms are scarcer, I like to book in advance. But when we're just seeing how far we can get, we just take the AAA books with us and call about an hour before we want to stop. Did you know that a lot of hotels will drop their rates around 9-10pm? That's when they're just sort of desperate to fill the room for the night.

Our recent road trip to Michigan was not our typical planned vacation...in that we had a much more rigid time table. We were pulling a U-haul up there, so we didn't feel comfortable with sort of our meandering ways...it was straight ahead and stay on the highway and only stop in those sorts of places where you can pull through! No backing up with a trailer!

On the way back, we were able to wander a little bit more, because we'd left the trailer in East Lansing. We also found a few letterboxes on the way back. The only state I added to my life list was Arkansas. But I hope to add Wyoming and South Dakota with perhaps Montana onto our states we've found letterboxes in!