The Great American Road Trip


How It Began


Last summer, amid marathon training and record breaking heat, a delusional Sandra and Heather had an awesome idea:


What if we took our kids and drove across the country to the east coast?  We enlisted Shanon for our crazy plan and soon, the Great American Road Trip was born.


Shanon has the van, Heather has the organizational skills to pull off a month long road trip with 11 people, and Sandra has the free pass to all the National Parks.  We’re a team made in heaven!


Months of talking, dreaming, planning and saving and we are on the road!


The Plan
It took some finesse to convince our long-suffering husbands that they should fund this crazy idea, but we framed it by saying that we would cart 8 kids to the east coast and they could enjoy a plane ride to meet up with us.  Really, we were doing the hard work and they would be able to swoop in and reap the joys of a family vacation at the beach.


On a pleasant Wednesday morning, we loaded up the van and headed off into the wild blue yonder.  Our goal is to get to Amarillo, TX by nightfall.  Heather promised us the best ice cream on the planet once we cross the Texan border and we are nothing if not easily bribed.



Tomorrow, we head towards Dallas because Texas is the largest mass of land and we need two days of driving to get across it.  
But then….then we get to New Orleans and hug the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to Panama City Beach, FL, where the sandy beaches await our pale Utah winter bodies.  
A few days of rest and recovery at a beach house should help us gear up for the next adventure of our trip—Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Tennessee.  This has been a bucket list item for a while and I’m super excited to spend a few days camping.


After the Great Smokies, we head over to a beach house in Outer Banks, North Carolina.  Everyone we’ve talked to that has been there say it’s amazing.  That’s where our husbands (and a few of the missing kids) will meet up with us for beaches, sight-seeing, food, and fun.  
From Outer Banks, we split up into our respective families and head towards Washington, DC, Palmyra, NY (upstate NY), and New York City.  Husbands fly home, we reconvene in the van and head to Cape Cod, MA.  Then up to Acadia National Park in Maine, another bucket list destination.

My brood and I have to fly home from Portland, ME to get back for a family reunion.  Heather and Shanon will begin the long car ride home through Canada.  
If all goes well, we should be returning home just in time to say “School starts next month!”

Of course there are a hundred places we’ll see.  A thousand memories made. A million pictures to take. And a billion stories to share. Hopefully we can capture the best ones here.

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