How It All Started

Several years ago I read about the ultimate Western National Parks US 89 trip in a National Geographic Travel magazine.  I told Robert about it then I pretty much forgot about it.  Fortunately Robert had not forgotten.  Two years ago he mentioned that he thought we should do this trip either go to or from Florida on one of our snow bird trips.

The ultimate trip for Robert would be do do this in style in a classic car.  The 68 Firebird that we have?  No, not too comfortable and I'm not confident driving it.  A 62 T-Bird?  Umm.  Don't have one but Robert had just happened to have found one online.  While on vacation in Maine two years ago we took a side trip to check out the car.  It needed a lot of work and was over priced.  The compromise vehicle was a 1999 Chrylser Sebring that Robert found online.  It was a peach with about 24,000 miles!   We picked it up in Pompano Beach FL.  Unfortunately it had been in storage for many years.  One day it left us stranded on a busy road in St Cloud.  The issue was easily fixed.  A few other issues popped up that once again were fixed.  Robert has great confidence in it.  I don't.

In the fall of 2015 we traded-in our day-to-day car for a new Subaru.  Reason being was that the Subaru had many safety features to help overcome the little bad habits that we had developed.  We thought long and hard about which car to take on this trip-a cool car that would make the trip a real adventure or a boring, safer car.  We also had to decide if we should take the trip South to North or the reverse.

The trip was on again, off again, on again, off again, and finally on again.  We decided to start in the north soon after Labor Day when there would be less families but yet still warm enough for Glacier to be open.

Planning began!  We picked up maps, travel guides and National Park booklets from AAA.

We determined that we wanted to be at Glacier NP the day after Labor Day.    This started our choosing of places to stay and guessing how long we would need in each location.  Our first hotel was chosen in Cut Bank, MT near Glacier.  From there we worked our way back East.  We wanted to spend a few days with our dear friends in Bejou, MN.  One overnight would be needed between MT and MN.  We then planned the remaining trip from MN to home in VT.  This required two more nights.

The planning of towns and hotels was a lot of work.  We used AAA's online TripTik planner.  We both worked on different legs.  Robert did a great job finding hotels in or near the towns that we thought would work for us.  I created a spreadsheet of dates, locations, confirmation numbers, hotel phone numbers and mileage from last stop.  I created another spreadsheet with dates, hotels, costs, cancel-by dates and hotel rewards numbers.  Teamwork at it's best!

 Our planning took us south from MT.   We guessed the best we could how many nights we wanted to stay in certain locations.  We also wanted to build in a few days to relax and do laundry.  We made plans for all the National Parks on or near US 89.  Once we reached Tucson and the Saguaro NP we planned the easterly journey to Florida.  We wanted to visit Carlsbad, San Antonio, and Galveston.  We weren't sure if there were any other "must/should sees".

After Galveston we didn't see anything that caught our eye and decided to boogy on  home.  We wanted to plan our last day such that we could arrive home early afternoon to get settled in before dark.

As fate would have it our last day's route takes us through Ocala where Robert's brother Jim lives.  Since it will be a short driving day we plan to stop for a little visit with him and family.  Also, it just happens that our final day on the road will be Robert's 70th birthday!!  Most appropriate as this trip was what he wanted to do for his special birthday.

The whole process of completing dates and hotel reservations took about a week working off and on.  Now begins the much easier planning of road snacks, reading material and traveling needs, in addition to what we will need in Florida from VT for the following  seven and a half months.