Tag: itinerary

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ChroNICles of Route 66 for Our Buddy Nick, Who’s 66

Our buddy Nick celebrated his 66th birthday the week before we drove half of Route 66 from Chicago to Albuquerque. He asked me to send him a few photos of Route 66 signs and to “take notes” to share with him, since he plans to drive Route 66 sometime before he turns 67. I assured him I would take “copious notes” – – which turned into my ChroNICles just for Nick. In case you plan to travel Route 66, these may be of interest to you as well.

We embraced a slow form of travel by only traveling half of the route on this leg of the journey. We flew into Chicago, rented a Ford Explorer one way from Chicago to Albuquerque, and flew home from there. Every point in between was filled with wonder of our nation, so it’s fitting that on this Independence Day as we celebrate America, I can look back and share 12 slices of what I learned along the highways and byways of Route 66.

Take the road trip! There is no better way to celebrate our great nation and to experience the changing landscapes of America than by taking a drive. Ever since I was a child, I have loved going different places to broaden my horizons and explore a variety of cultural flavors! I’d visit a place – Paris, London, Berlin, Orlando, Asheville, Nashville – – thinking I’d seen France, England, Germany, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee. Boy, was I wrong! Worse: I hadn’t truly “seen” any of those cities, either – just a landmark or two at most. I realize now what John Steinbeck meant when he said, in Travels with Charley, that “We don’t take a trip. A trip takes us.” To see a slice of America by car, watching the changing landscapes from state to state, is the way to experience the diversity of our land and its people. We find it in the roadside diners, in the conversations with waitresses and other travelers.

Get in touch with your inner criminal graffiti artist self with the situation allows! Buy more than one can of spray paint from Wal-Mart in Amarillo, where they keep it locked behind the glass and will have to help you get your colors. Go for the yellow and black, and add the white and pink. Then drive on over to Cadillac Ranch and paint. But do not – I repeat, DO NOT – wear a hat. The wind is so fierce, it’ll lift you off the ground at times and take your hat with it.

Look for the things no one tells you about – There’s a place somewhere near Albuquerque that plays America The Beautiful if you drive along the teeth of the roadway. We missed that. When we start leg #2 in California and drive back to Albuquerque, we will find out where this is and drive on the teeth on the very end of our Route 66 adventure, coming sometime in the next year! We had deep discussions about the things we don’t see.

Stay on the path, but stray from the path, too. Build enough flexibility in your plan to be able to throw it all out and do something spontaneous. We had planned to go to Meramac Caverns, but after going up in the St. Louis Gateway Arch, we wanted to see it from the river, so we took a river cruise instead, then planned a different cavern the next day. We saw signs in Uranus, Missouri for the Uranus Fudge Factory, where they claim that “the best fudge comes from Uranus,” and the t-shirts were too inappropriate to pass up. We built in some iconic landmarks, some quirky stops, some experiences in nature, some retro diners and some ice-cream-for-dinner nights, some chain hotels and some back-in-the-day motels, a peak and a canyon. We wanted the sampler platter of America, and we savored every bite! We were early to bed and early to rise so we could take it all in and still have some energy to enjoy it all.

Keep your eyes peeled for the unexpected – – you just might see it! Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I’d see a Road Runner and remains of a Mohave Rattlesnake on the trip, but I did! I saw Prairie Dogs, too, and we watched them playing from our room overlooking their playground. The simplest moments turned out to be some of the most memorable ones.

Take the time to talk to the servers! If you’ve never eaten “the special” breakfast in Tulsa, Oklahoma at a hole in the wall cafe with a waitress who’s the Queen of Bling and has a red tattoo of a Q and the shape of diamond right next to her left ear on her cheek to prove it to anyone who doubts it even after seeing the bracelets that line her arm from elbow to wrist and then, when you ask if she’s from Tulsa, she coughs the raspy smoker’s cough and emphatically says, “HELL no, I’ve lived here for 40 years, but I’m from Wisconsin,” as if you’ve offended her, you might want to try it. She may have gotten a few double-takes from some traveling diners, but I realized I was in the midst of my kind of people when I sat down and heard the blatant honesty spew forth from her lips, telling us about a recent storm she’d endured. And talk to April at The Midpoint Cafe in Adrian, Texas over a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. She’s a single mother in her young 20s but knows the whole history of her corner of the world and would climb one of those tall windmills for $56.00 an hour if she could repair them. This is how Steinbeck wrote Travels With Charley – from the lively conversations with his fellow Americans!

Pack light, but bring home some souvenirs and mail some postcards! Memories are the best souvenirs – – photos, journals, blogs, and t-shirts help bring us back to those moments. We have a rule: if it won’t fit in the carry-on and personal bag, it doesn’t come home with us. We pack a 3×3 for a week’s trip – 3 bottoms, 3 tops. That makes 9 outfits and leaves plenty of space for bringing back some new socks, t-shirts, bracelets, and other small things that will fit in our bags.I even found room for a Texas Longhorn and a Highland Bull! I found a turqoise and mother of pearl bracelet in Old Town Albuquerque in a store called Warpath with a red door that reminded me so much of my mother I had to have it. It keeps her on my mind and keeps the memories of the trip close at hand, too.

Wear a great pair of shoes and carry the best water tumbler you can find. My inner hippie couldn’t drive Route 66 without my trusty Birkenstocks, but for getting out on the peaks and in the canyons, I relied on my On Clouds. Even though it’s a road trip, there’s a lot of walking and stair climbing in parts. The water tumbler: I filled it with icy water at every single restaurant and hotel along the way (except one, where it smelled a little funky), and it cut down on the amount of bottled water I had to buy and kept me cool and hydrated.

My new bulls, and a wine cork noted with the date, people, and place of savoring.

Make a countdown list of the things you need to do so you can leave at peace and embrace slow travel (without stressing) at its finest. The most challenging thing for me to remember is holding the mail, but the USPS makes it easy to arrange online, so even if I remember at the airport, I can still make it happen!

Leave something behind – a time capsule, a signature on a sign, some graffiti. We left a styrofoam cooler, inviting someone else to use it and give it a new life, then share it with us if they felt moved.

Eating Lupper (supper off the lunch menu) at The Big Texan in Amarillo

Take a group – you’ll share fabulous company and financial costs, but whatever you do…..don’t talk politics. It can ruin a trip. Enjoy the moments without splitting hairs over differences. We met a couple from New York, who dove straight into their political stance as we all sat outside at The Blue Swallow Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico. When they realized all of us were not in agreement with them, my husband broke in: “What you’re looking at right here in the four of us is a wide part of the political spectrum. From the moderate to the conservative, we have a wide gap.” They were amazed, and asked, “How do you do this, traveling together?” My husband was quick: “We talk about other things besides the POTUS. We talk about the places, the food…. we respect each other’s opinions, and we keep it that way.” He wasn’t afraid to speak the truth we could all agree on….and when we returned from dinner, the couple was sitting elsewhere.

Research, read, and explore ahead of time so you’ll appreciate all the things you’ll see. Get the Roadtrippers Plus app for planning the journey, and print a hard copy of your planned-but-flexible itinerary to take, along with a hard copy of a travel book and a map in case you don’t have good cell service.

Happy Birthday, and enjoy the Route 66 Experience, Nick! There’s nothing quite like it!

Birthday Cheers!
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June 4 – The Mother Road Planning – Day 4

This weekend, we’ll be making a list of all the things we’ll need to do around the house before we leave on our trip down half of Route 66 later this month. Since summer is here and we all come down with a case of wanderlust at some point, you may find that these are things you do as well as you plan to travel. I invite you to leave any of your favorite hacks and tips in the comments, particularly those I might have forgotten to add in this phase of list making.

We’ve already made our pet reservations at the boarding facility. One of our boys needed his heartworm injection, so I called the vet to be sure that all of their shots were up to date to avoid any last-minute glitches with boarding requirements. I have a backup plan with a friend’s daughter who can come to our home in case we were to need any last-minute Plan B put into action for pet sitting, even though we don’t anticipate that.

We’ve already reserved our rental car, too, and we’ll need to print the car confirmation information.

I’ve also gone online to USPS.COM to schedule our mail to be held during the days we will be gone, and then for all of our accumulated mail to be delivered on the day we return. I have a login and password to be able to schedule this service online anytime I need to have our mail held, and it’s so convenient to make these arrangements from my phone. One of the things I like best about it is that in the event that I had forgotten to do this ahead of time and remembered while sitting in the airport getting ready to leave, I could still arrange for the bulk of the mail to be held.

Here are some other things we’ll be adding to our countdown to-do list:

We’ll want to charge our batteries for our home security cameras the week before we leave so that we can monitor what is going on here while we’re away. We’ll also test our home security system and notify our security company that we will be out of town and let them know that our alarm will be set while we are away.

We’ll also want to fill our birdfeeders and water our plants the night before we leave (and pray for rain to water the outside plants and replenish the bird baths naturally while we are gone).

We’ll need to go by the bank to get the cash we plan to take with us, and to notify our bank that we will be in other states so that if we want to use a debit card, the bank will approve out of state charges. We’ll need to anticipate toll roads and money for tips, so we’ll need some smaller bills and change for these costs.

We’ll need to be sure that our prescriptions and medications we need are refilled and on hand the week before we leave.

We will need to make parking reservations at the Atlanta Airport – and this is no small task at the world’s busiest airport.

We’ll make sure a family member knows how to gain access to the house and disarm the alarm in case we need someone to be able to get in and check on things should we need it.

We’ll need to make a packing list two weeks before the trip to be sure we have all we need. For things we need we don’t have, we will then have time to shop for those things or order them to allow delivery time. We will also need to make sure that our luggage dimensions are correct; since we only take carry-on luggage and never check bags, we have to be sure our bags meet the luggage specifications for the airline.

We’ll need to start a folder with important papers like our flight, hotel, and rental car confirmation numbers and trip itineraries (I will be doing this with a shared Google Doc so that all of us are able to access the information at any time).

We’ll need to gather our auto insurance cards so that we can provide these when we pick up the rental car.

We’ll need to set our thermostat to the temperature we want to keep our home while we are gone the morning we leave.

We’ll need to clean out the refrigerator and take the garbage to the dump two or three days before we leave.

We’ll want to remember to unplug our televisions while we are gone in case of any severe storms.

We’ll continue the list as we go, but these are things we need to create reminders for so that we can check them off and feel confident when we leave that we have not forgotten something important.

We can’t always control the little things that can go sideways on a trip, but one thing we can do is pave the way for the peace of mind that we’ve taken care of things on the homefront to buy those moments of resting assured we’ve dotted our i’s and crossed our t’s as best we can.

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June 3 – The Mother Road Planning – Day 3

Steinbeck coined the term “The Mother Road” in his novel The Grapes of Wrath.

Last summer, I’d spent weeks researching and planning a trip to Yellowstone National Park when we shifted gears at the last minute and cancelled the whole trip. I’d booked 3 hotels, purchased refundable airfare, and mapped out a route. I’d talked to friends who had made recommendations and offered all the best tips. We were all but packed.

But the rental car was the issue. The major airport into Yellowstone was closed for runway upgrades, so we’d purchased tickets to Bozeman, Montana and planned to drive down to the western entrance and work our way around the park. The only rental car I could find was one town over and cost $7 less than a week-long Alaskan cruise. The rental car alone, without gas or fees, without the airfare and the hotels and the food and the Uber ride – seven dollars less. So we backed out of the trip and opted for a trip that was within our budget.

Little did we know at that time that Yellowstone National Park would be shut down due to flooding and road washouts at the time we had planned to go. It turned out that despite our hopes and dreams to visit the park, the circumstances and costs didn’t seem feasible. As travelers, we have learned to follow our instincts and be flexible – and it often pays off in ways we’d have never dreamed. Where we missed driving through Yellowstone and seeing the bison, we stood on a hovercraft in Ketchikan watching bald eagles swoop down to catch fish.

This year, as we sat planning a trip to Glacier National Park in the local coffee shop with my husband’s brother and his wife, we discovered that one of the main attractions had no tickets available. We could not get tickets to Going to the Sun Road, and according to one friend, we should book a year in advance and make sure that we are able to do that if we make the trip to Glacier. We could not arrange to see one of the things we most wanted to see, so we returned to the destination drawing board.

That’s how we decided to travel part of Route 66 this summer. Driving The Mother Road, as John Steinbeck coined it, has been on my list of vacation hopes for years. It spans from Chicago, Illinois to the Santa Monica Pier in California and would take us a couple of weeks to enjoy from start to finish in full completion if we drove it all at once. We knew that time would prevent the entire trip this summer, but when we started talking about the possibility of driving half this summer and the other half later, we grew more and more excited about the adventure – knowing that we could make the trip at our own pace. And while rental cars are still expensive, we’d share the cost and the driving.

We’d decided on the basics – destination, budget, and main attractions, so we began mapping out our itinerary on the Roadtrippers app by entering our starting point and adding waypoints. We added an iconic motel – The Blue Swallow Inn in Arizona, and other motels – along with landmarks like The Gemini Giant and the Blue Whale of Catoosa, and also added a few restaurants recommended along the route.

This weekend and over the coming weeks, we’ll watch YouTube videos of the places we plan to visit all along Route 66, we may watch the movie CARS, and we’ll listen to the Route 66 Pandora station. I’ll probably revisit sections of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), in which he named Route 66 “The Mother Road.” We’ll begin to immerse ourselves in learning more about the places we will see on the way – a strategy to engage in deeper learning about our culture and cultivating an appreciation of its rich history.

These are some of the ways we enhance the enjoyment of our trip as we anticipate the adventure!

Here is one of the You Tube videos we’ll watch this weekend on one of the iconic landmarks on the route, explaining some of its historical significance:

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June 1 – The Mother Road Planning Day 1

Roadtrippers App – the best trip planning tool I have found

This month marks vacation month once my 210-day contract ends for this school year, a few short weeks from when my next one is set to begin. We’ll fly out on June 24 from our home an hour south of Atlanta, Georgia to Chicago, Illinois to drive a little more than half of the east-to-west direction of Route 66, ending in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve had a long-time dream of traveling the roadways to see a cross-section of The Mother Road just as Steinbeck and others with relentless resfeber have been enjoying in truck campers named Rocinante and other less-famous vehicles since it came into being.

I’ve downloaded Roadtrippers to map our journey, and I’ll be blogging and photographing it every step of the way. This month, every day (except June 17-21 when I write with Open Write) will be devoted to the planning process and the way we decided on this travel plan as our vacation for this year. The last week of the month will be the actual journey from Chicago to New Mexico following Route 66.

My first step in vacation planning: downloading Roadtrippers, experimenting with it, and deciding to upgrade to Roadtrippers Plus. I have created an account, and I’m ready to begin planning. The app will map my distance each day and actually calculate my mileage and projected gasoline costs based on the rental car for the miles per gallon and the cost of gasoline. I can’t recommend this app highly enough after using it for several “test drive” road trips with the free version. I have even shared the very beginning of the itinerary with those who’ll be traveling with me through the share feature in the app.

Hold on, America! Here we come!

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Relaxing the Pace: My Experience Goals for 2023

“Slow travel is being in a place long enough to experience it without having a strict itinerary. It isn’t about seeing everything but experiencing the soul of a place.”
― Bhavana Gesota, The Art of Slow Travel: See the World and Savor the Journey On a Budget

Tulips in Gibbs Gardens – Ball Ground, Georgia

In April, I took a girls’ trip with my sister-in-law to north Georgia and North Carolina. We ambled around Gibbs Gardens in Ball Ground, Georgia at a leisurely pace, admiring the tiers of tulips and daffodils before embarking on the scenic drive to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, where we sat by the huge stone fireplace and sipped coffee in those relaxing wooden rocking chairs you see in the mountains in places where life is simpler and a fresher type of air cleans the lungs and awakens the senses.

Big stone fireplace at Grove Park Inn, Asheville, NC

“I’m loving this,” I told her. “I don’t feel rushed, and it’s a more relaxed pace than the itinerary I usually keep when traveling. I zip from place to place, and I don’t generally sit down and breathe until day’s end.” I was especially thinking about the EF Tour I’d taken with students to Europe in June 2019, when we’d visited four countries in ten days with a full day of air travel there and back as two of those days. It had drained every bit of me!

Quote on the rock of the Grove Park Inn Lobby – there were many of these all over the place

Sitting in the huge stone-walled lobby, I noticed the quotes on the rocks in the wall. On a breakneck-paced trip, I would have never noticed such a detail. As I observed more, I discovered that they were scattered throughout the hotel, and I visually scaled the walls on a self-secret scavenger hunt, making pictures, taking the time to ponder each one and to consider why it was selected out of all the quotes they could have chosen to etch there.

Grove Park Inn Gingerbread House, winner of the 2021 competition

We stumbled upon the gingerbread house display from the annual competition and noticed each captivating detail of these winning designs. Further down the hall, we found the desk F. Scott Fitzgerald used during his time at the Grove Park Inn. Our room was directly across the hall from the two rooms that were “his” at the inn. We strolled through the gift shops, too, taking time to peruse the books about the history of this historic hotel. We each bought one and returned to the great fireplace to read them.

Open Windows at The Grove Park Inn – Historic Section – Asheville, NC

That’s why months later, when I saw the book The Art of Slow Travel, I knew it would be my next read. Four months into 2022, I was already beginning to realize that a more relaxed pace when traveling has more than mere physical benefits. Throughout 2022, most every trip that didn’t involve our camper held a hard lesson about taking life at a slower pace, lugging less on the journey, and savoring more tranquil moments.

My experience goals for 2023 are to cut back on entertainment in the form of concerts, sports, plays, and movies and instead focus on the experiences that are found outdoors – kayaking, hiking, long walks, conversations over orange spiced tea and playlists by the fire pit (my son and daughter in law gave us one for Christmas). It’s time to open the windows and relax the pace. To breathe. To embrace slow travel not only on trips, but as a daily living practice.