Route Planning
Mike spent hours yesterday planning and organizing our potential route.
Because the main goal of this trip is to create time to bond and spend quality time with our family, including the ones we haven't historically had many opportunities to really get to know, we're planning the main stops around all of the places where we have family. Which turns out to be a lot.
When we put those into the map, along with all of the places we'd like to sight-see and be tourists, it put our trip at 14 months! It's pretty difficult to decide how long to stay in each place. Even on such a long trip, there are so many places to go, and so many people we'd like to spend time with; it never feels like enough. And it's really hard to anticipate how we'll feel in each place, and how long we'll want to stay once we're actually there.
Mike would like to stay a full six weeks at his family's cabin in Michigan. I've never even been there, so it's hard to know whether I'll find it peaceful and relaxing or whether I'll get stir crazy and feel isolated if we're there for so long. I'm hoping we can convince some family and friends to come visit us up there; that would be a blast.
We also realized that, after Chicago, there are no specific places we need to be or people we need to see, so there's no point in planning where we go after that. We can either keep going, and hit Wyoming, Seattle, Portland. Or we can come back to San Francisco and try to do those places later. Or we can go back to places we want to revisit, like places where my family lives, since at that point it'll have been almost a year since I saw them last. Or we might even decide to move somewhere else to settle down!
As of now, with the tentative route we've laid out, we'd be leaving in Oct 2017, hitting Texas for Christmas, Atlanta in March 2018, the cabin in July, and ending in Chicago in September.