The Route

The most fun part about getting ready to head out is planning our travel route.  Because unlike C, I don’t really enjoy moving.  Don’t get me wrong, I really want to move, I just don’t want to deal with the process… So instead, I’ll talk about our route!

End of April – Get all of our stuff into storage and hit the road.  Day 1 will consist of heading to the Red River Gorge in KY.  Weather permitting, we will do some rock climbing before moving on to the western part of the state to visit friends.

May – In a nutshell: spend time with friends in KY/IN, be in Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas on our anniversary, then strike out north toward Theodore Roosevelt N.P. in ND around the middle of the month.  We’ll spend a week or so there and then move on to the Black Hills region in SD.

June – Climb Devil’s Tower in WY and then move on to the Tetons where we will be joined by our good friends L and A.  We will spend a lot of time here seeing the Tetons/Yellowstone area and hiking our brains out.  We’ll make a brief stop at Craters of the Moon in Idaho before continuing north to to Glacier N.P. and visiting my aunt.

July – Leave MT sometime after the 4th and continue westward.  Stop in Spokane, WA (Home! Not really anymore…) for about a week.  Continue toward the Olympic Peninsula and make a stop in the southern Cascades (Rainier, Mt. St. Helens area).  From here we will continue down the pacific coast into Oregon.

August – Poke around Tillamook and maybe get all the way down to Honeyman State Park before we have to pack it up and fly to MA out of Portland, OR.  We have two weddings to attend on back to back weekends.  One in Rhode Island and one in Pennsylvania.  My car will be stashed at my parents’ house in MA, so when all is said and done, we’ll drive it to Denver where it will remain for the rest of our trip.  After we fly from Denver back to Portland, we will continue in the RV.  In the last few days of the month we will make our way to Crater Lake.

September – Once we’ve had our fill of the Crater Lake area, we’ll continue into northern CA.  We plan to stay a week or so in the Lava Beds National Monument/Mt. Shasta/Mt. Lassen area and then head back toward the coast to see Redwood National Park.  After a few days there, we’ll continue to the Sacramento area and visit with my grandparents for a few days and continue south.  We plan to finish out the last week of September in the Kings Canyon/Joshua Tree area.

October – Our last month on the road will consist of Zion, Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and maybe a stop in El Paso for another family visit before heading to Denver to settle back down again.

As you can tell, the details begin to get a little more sparse the further on in our plan.  This is because it’s more of a rough draft and not only because I became lazier as this post got longer.  We know we want to see a lot, but we don’t want to completely wear ourselves out in the process!  We also wanted to leave room for spontaneity.