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 enough. Elliott will 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 (which I find difficult to accept cause in my mind I’m pretty frickin cool lol) 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.  So I’ve decided do something about it and we will venture on a 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’ll go,  where to camp, things to do, and what we need to bring along the way.  Developing this plan will be a good life lesson and we will use this as an educational opportunity by learning the history and fun facts of each place we’ll visit.  During our journey we’ll track the miles we drive and the ones we hike.  We’ll get to experience amazing views and hopefully see some wildlife along the way. We’ll be taking and sharing lots of pictures and documenting our many experiences on this blog.  Today is day 1 and our journey officially starts…. We hope you join us and enjoy the ride!!!

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 back to Jamestown, NY where we spend 4th of July every year. That’s where my wife and I grew up and have many friends and family still there we get to visit.

the maiden vessel…

After much debate between investing in a camper or going with a roof top tent, we decided on the tent option.  Obviously cost was a factor, but the idea we have the ability to be quick with our set up and take down was hard to pass up. When you add in the option of living more in the elements it made our choice more appealing.  The tent takes less than 2 mins to set up and less than 5 mins 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 can add trip destination points.  Around each stop you can click different icons where it populates things that are nearby like campsites, attractions, restaurants, food, or gas around the area you’re searching.  Clicking on the icons lets you jump over to their websites where you can directly book campsite reservations or purchase tickets.  This has all been incredibly helpful as it then calculates and shows your trip mileage overall as well as the mileage between each stop with the added bonus of estimated drive time. This however is only 1 main part necessary to properly plan.  From the information on the website we then 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 I was also able to add in columns to serve as checklists for the things we’ll need to make sure are accounted for along the way (Passes, reserved campsites, fees, site locations, contact info, ect..).  We’ve learned a lot during this planning process and are optimistic our plan will work out 🤞. FYI…campsites fill quickly so if you ever want to plan something like this you’ll need to lock in your reservations 4 months to a year in advance for some locations especially if you want a good spot.