the journey west…

a foreword from a father…

My son Elliott is 14 now and I’ve reach a point in my life where I question if I’ve prioritized the time we’ve spent together.  He’ll be in and out of High School before we know it and in those years I fear he’ll be too cool for school to want to hang out with his dad.  My anxiety kicked in as I realized we haven’t spent nearly enough time hangin out just being boys and experiencing life together and father time continues to tick on.  I’ve decided do something about it and we will venture on road trip out west this summer hitting the road right after his 7^th grade school year ends.  During the months prior to us hitting the road much work and preparation will need to be done.  We will use this opportunity to work together to plan out our trip.  Mapping out the places we go,  where we’ll camp, things we’ll do, and what we’ll need to bring.  Developing this plan will be a good life lesson and we’ll also use is as a educational opportunity by learning the history and fun facts of each place we’ll visit.  We’ll track the miles we drive and the ones we hike.  The amazing views and wildlife we will see taking pictures and documenting our experiences.  Today is day 1 and our journey officially starts..

forging our westerly path…

Our journey will stretch 10k miles across 15 states over a 6 week period.  We’ll start in Indiana and head northwest all the way to Washington where we’ll then head south through California turning east through Nevada until we reach northern Arizona. From there we’ll head back north up through Utah working our way back east through Colorado and Nebraska until we make it home.   

the maiden vessel…

After much debate between investing in a camper and going with a roof top tent we decided on the tent option.  Obviously cost was a factor but the idea of our ability to be quick in set up with the added living in the elements made our choice more appealing.  The tent takes less than 2 mins to set up and less than 5 to pack it back up

the big plan…

The planning has been quite time consuming but fun nonetheless.  I found an awesome website called Roadtrippers.com that has so many cool features where you add to the trip a destination point.  Around the destination point you can click an icon where it populates all campsites, attractions, restaurants, food, or gas option that show up all around the area you’re searching.  Clicking on icons lets you jump over to websites where you can directly book campsite reservations.  This has all been incredibly helpful as it calculates and shows your trip mileage overall as well as the mileage between stops with the added drive time bonus.  This however is only 1 main part necessary to properly plan.  From the information on the website we created an excel template using tabs for key areas of planning.  Transferring the information from the website over to the excel allowed us to reflect the order of our journey but also add in columns to use for checklist for things we’ll need to make sure are accounted for (Passes, reserved campsites, fees, site locations, contact info, ect..).  We’ve learn a lot during this planning process and hope our plan works out.  Campsite fill quick so if you ever want to plan something you need to lock in your reservations 4 months to a year in advance for some locations if you want a good spot.