Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Planning a Trip

Last night for Family Home Evening, Grig and I sat down and began planning for the trip we are taking next month. Kevin hasn't seen his paternal grandparents since May of last year, and we decided our family trip this year would be to go and visit them.

We are super excited about it, but as traced the route in our atlas, I began to realize how long this trip really is. We'll be crossing 11 states from start to finish! That's crazy. I told Kevin last night that by the time he is two he is going to have visited more states than I had at the age of 18. He's already been to Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Texas (kind of, he was in the womb at the time, so I don't know if that last one counts. He was there, he just couldn't see anything). We're going to be adding quite a few more states to that list before long.

Grig and I are very similar. We're not very detailed trip planners. However, last night as we were tracing our route, we began to think of places that we wanted to stop at while we traveled. We listed off a couple, but mostly we just want to kind of fly by the seat of our pants.

That's not to say that we haven't planned at all. We know how far we're going to be traveling each day, and approximately what our start times and stopping times will be. We've already reserved our hotel (we have family we are going to be staying with the other nights), and we're planning on completing our 34 hour trip in 3 days.

Car trip! Whoohoo!

We'll see how it goes.

During that time, I probably will be taking a vacation from blogging as well, though there may be occasional updates. We are planning on taking lots of videos and pictures as we drive across the country.

We're pretty stoked. I love road-trips, and we like visiting family as well. We are excited to visit Grig's parents' home and spend time with Kevin's aunts and uncles as well. We are also looking forward to seeing his great-grandma.

As we've been planning, I've been trying really hard to avoid getting stressed about the trip. We have a limited amount of funds for it, but after careful calculations, we found out that we would be saving between $300-$600 by driving instead of flying. Traveling time will be longer, but the only decent priced tickets I could find had a 24 hour layover anyway, so at least we'll be moving and exploring instead of sitting in an airport.

There are a few things we still need to buy before we can leave, so we're hoping that doesn't deplete our funds too much.

Overall though, we've been very blessed and we're very grateful that we are able to go on this trip. We're planning on packing food to take with us so that we don't have to pay to eat out a lot as well. If we're conservative about our cash, we should be just fine!

Who knows? This might become a yearly tradition!

2 comments:

  1. You make me laugh. He couldn't see anything...poor Kevin :)

    I also love road trips. The less planning, the better. I like to feel like we can just take off on am adventure whenever we want...it is an illusion, of course, but I like to pretend....it sounds like you guys will have a great experience.

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  2. I agree about the detailed planning. Just relax. Know what roads you're going to take so you don't make a wrong turn and end up in Timbuktu or something. Of course that might be fun too. Do u have AAA. I know that u can go into their office and they can totally plan the whole trip with places to visit and everything. And don't forget to have plenty of things for Kevin to do because he is going to be strapped down and may get cranky. But above all have fun and enjoy.

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