The birth of the Route 66 travel binder!

So, like I said in my last blog, we have an idea where we are going and how we plan to get back, but the thing about a trip like this is knowing just how long we can go each day and how to pace ourselves. That is my biggest worry with a trip of this magnitude. I had nightmares after we first mentioned this trip of being out on the road, taking our time, and all of the sudden finding ourselves in the middle of B.F.E. hungry, tired and out of gas! Not a fun way to spend summer vacation, huh?

First things first. How will we make this trip out and back fit into a 21 day span? I started with a little calendar, filling in the dates that we would be gone and working my way backwards. Last leg Columbia, MO to Home, then the next Dodge City, KS to Columbia, MO and so forth. I found that easily we could make it work, but once I got to the Route 66 part of the trip, I had no clue how many days or where we should stop. First thing first, however, we had to figure out how long we would stay in LA or any of the other places on the journey home. Traveling from one destination to the next would be no fun if we weren't able to see anything, really. Honestly, no matter how many calendars I blocked the days out on, it always just seemed that we had some kind of problem with it. I think I shredded 15 calendars before I had to throw my hands up and walk away for a little bit.

Now, some of my friends know I have OCD tendencies. Let me tell you, this trip really brought those forward in a huge way! For WEEKS all I looked up on the internet were things about Route 66. Maps, sights, towns, stories. I mean, obsessively! I finally decided that I just needed to be realistic, just look at the map and figure something out, after all, I had spent days plotting the turn by turn directions into a ton of maps (because you can only change the route so many times in Google Maps before it won't take anymore). I looked for big cities, someplace I knew we would be able to find a decent place to stay. Remember those OCD tendencies I talked about? Yeah, seedy old hotels are a No-No for me. 

So, I started with St. Louis. That was a given, takes a five and a half to six hours to get from here to there. Once there, we can't miss the Arch, because Jon has talked about wanting to see it since he was in Kindergarten and the class Gingerbread man visited there and sent back pictures, haha. From St. Louis, with using my maps, it looks like about 227 miles along Route 66 to Springfield, MO. That's a pretty big place, should be able to find a decent hotel there. Then I moved on. Before long I had plotted stops in Tulsa (OK), Clinton (OK), Amarillo (TX), Albuquerque (NM), Holbrook (AZ), Flagstaff (AZ), Kingman (AZ), Barstow (CA) and then somewhere in LA/Hollywood area. I tried to take some advice from a website I had found and keep to near 200 miles a day. I just hope that works in the real world! 

When Tony got home that day, he had two days off, so we decided to try to really put some time into planning on those days off. The next thing I knew, we were looking at hotels in those different cities, pricing, trying to find something that we could stay in with two queen beds. I was busy jotting down ideas for hotels and we went one city to the next and spent a whole day just looking at hotels! I decided I better get organized, because all these sheets of paper and calendars and lists of sights that I thought were MUST SEE, were scattered all over my desk. I ran out to Walgreens and bought a binder and some dividers and more notebook paper. The Route 66 travel binder was born!