God and Expedia are My Friends:

Planning, Planning, Praying...

THE TRIP – Day 0.1

With the wedding date as a midpoint in our trip time frame, I began to plan the logistics of our travels. I had culled my initial list of the national parks I wanted to see down to twenty, still way too ambitious a number even for a month of driving. I got out (more) library books on the national parks, went to the parks' websites and copied maps and brochures. I searched road trip travel tips and decided that keeping the average mileage per day at about 300 miles was wise. We regularly drove 570 miles on the first day of our yearly trip back east. We also drove through both Chicago and New York City on our yearly trip. Looking west, it would appear, since we were not planning to go near Los Angeles, that the biggest city we would encounter would be Denver, a small town in comparison to The Big Three. By avoiding LA, keeping our daily mileage down, we could have pleasant manageable days of driving, even for POACA (People Of A Certain Age).

In the midst of planning the trip, I became overwhelmed by the enormity of what we were about to do. I'm a cautious person by nature, not a risk taker. (I don't get into airplanes.) Now I was planning to travel by car 6,000+ miles through 13 states, through tornado-prone plains, wild-fire prone grasslands, heat-wave prone deserts, places that have earthquakes periodically, through states with 80 mile per hour speed limits. (If people in Chicago drive 85 mph in a 55 mph speed zone, what could we expect with an 80 mph speed limit?) We'd be driving through mountain passes with multiple hair-pin turns and steep drop-offs, through parks whose websites warned us to stay 25 yards away from any animals to avoid contracting Hantavirus or the Bubonic Plague (!!!!) And what about delays? With set hotel reservations for many nights, one bad day of driving or car trouble could throw a four week schedule off pretty severely. I started spending as much time praying as planning. Did I believe and trust that God could keep us safe, sane, healthy and on schedule for twenty-five days? (Spoilers: He could, and did. He kept our car running, the severe weather just missing us, the wild fires contained when we got where we were going, the 120 degree heat two days behind us. And the drivers in 80 mph speed zones only drove about five miles over the limit! Also, no earthquakes or plague. He also protected us from the gun fight outside our hotel in Bakersfield, California, but that's a story for another day.)

Prayed up, I attacked the next stages of planning. I was brutal in my final selection of parks and got the list down to five – Zion, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Grand Tetons and the Badlands. This would make for reasonable planning and driving, but also allow for some flex time. It turned out to be a wise move and allowed us to stop and see things we hadn't initially planned to see, sites and areas I'd come to refer to as “Surprise Adventures”. I used Google Maps to plot our course and made up a calendar of our daily mileage. I then entered the marvelous world of Expedia, making hotel reservations for all the places near the parks we planned to visit and places where I thought it might be hard to get a room on the day we would be traveling through, like the middle of nowhere stretches of Utah and Nevada. Expedia made it easy to find and make reservations, and as I discovered, easy to cancel and change reservations, as I adjusted mileage and dates to make for a more sane trip. In the end, we planned on being on the road for 25 days, which included a two day visit with our daughters in Minneapolis at the end of our trip.

Partially because we are POACA, and partially because we have Luddite tendencies, we navigated the entire trip without a smart phone or a GPS, relying instead on an excellent Rand McNally atlas from 2006 that my son had rescued from a dumpster when he was in college. We also bought a 2016 copy of The Next Exit, an excellent resource recommended by our RV-traveling neighbors. This book contains listings of hotels, campgrounds, restaurants, hospitals, gas stations, and other services available at every exit on every interstate in the country. It also lists the location of every interstate rest stop and makes it visually easy to see what exits have a wide selection of services and what areas of a particular interstate have few or none, an valuable asset when approaching the vast wastelands of Utah and Nevada. We also traveled with a laptop and planned to rely heavily on the Wi-Fi networks of the hotels we stayed at to check weather and road conditions and access specialty maps for the following day's travels.

With more prayer, a fresh oil change for the car, a box of travel and hiking snacks, clothes for all weather and circumstances – including a wedding! - and two iPods of music, we were ready to hit the road...

Map out your future - but do it in pencil. The road ahead is as long as you make it. Make it worth the trip. - Jon Bon Jovi

Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. - Joshua 1:9

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Flatlanders on the Road

THE TRIP – Day 1

Antioch, Illinois to Lincoln, Nebraska

570 miles