If it's Tuesday, this must be Yellowstone

Visit California, October 2011

Many, perhaps most, people going to visit a place they are unfamiliar with look for information about their destination to get a sense of what they can and should do there. Some buy guidebooks. Some hire guides or book group tours to try and ensure they get the most out of the trip. For some people, there is a strong desire to "not miss anything".

 



 

This last group does not include us. Anymore.

 



 

In the early days of our traveling and touring, we were in that camp of not-missers. I think we both came to the conclusion, after not-too-many of these trips, that vacations should be, well, a vacation and not a job. Having all of your days scheduled from early to late, and obsessively running from site to site, just wasn't fun. So we adopted a policy that said, in large part, whatever we miss will either be there next time we come through, or we'll miss it without missing it. If you catch my drift.

 



 

We coupled this with a tendency to not have too many short stays in too many places over a too-short trip. We really didn't want to experience "if it's Tuesday, we must be in Belgium". And I think we've been pretty successful overall in achieving our objective, which is to relax and enjoy the places we are rather than to think of a trip as a set of goals to be checked off on some list.

 



 

How do I reconcile that travel philosophy with this trip, then? We are staying in 14 places over the course of 30 nights. We are traveling, excluding local touring in each location, about 2,700 miles by car. This concerns me. Is the trip going to be a marathon, a long car ride punctuated by carrying bags in and out of hotels? Are we going to be captured by the planning we/I am doing and miss the beauty of where we are to the details of what we have on our agenda? I won't know for sure for weeks yet, but here's what I think.

 



 

First consider that problem of the 14 hotels we have to find, check in to, move our stuff into, unpack, pack, move our stuff out, and check out of.

 



 

Four of them are one-nighters, and they are mostly related to just how big the country is. If you have to travel the 550 miles between, say, Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone, you kind of have two choices. The first is drive for 9 or 10 hours, which is pretty miserable. The second is to stop somewhere in the middle, breaking the trip up. To the extent you can find something interesting to see or do along the way at or near that stop, so much the better. But it does add to the hotel count.

 



 

We have one four-nighter and three three-nighters, which I would characterize as leisurely. Plenty of time to settle in, plenty of time to get to know the place before moving on. Although some might say I'm missing the point here by an order and magnitude and it's more like two weeks (or six months) to get to know a place. But I think this fits our attention span, for this trip.

 



 

That leaves five two-nighters. Two of them are after a relatively short drive - 1.5 and 2 hours, respectively. So I'm hoping they will feel like we just shifted rooms a little closer to where we want to be next, rather than a whole day of pack-check out-drive-drive-drive-check in. Only three of them seem to be a situation where we get to our destination late in the day, and have one full day before we pickup and leave again.

 



 

A final point should actually be the first point: my original concept for this trip was to spend a month "on the road". The destination was the road; the stops were, well, just stops along the way. In some sense it's a wonderful coincidence that our stops will be in some of the most magnificent locations in the world. Well okay, it's not really a coincidence. But the point is that if you go back to this concept you can see that we are probably achieved a decent balance on this trip.