From Mass to Cali and back

A question about Yellowstone:

If we go there and don't have a TOAD, will we still have a good trip or will we be stuck seeing the inside of our camper and nothing else?

i know very little about how Yellowstone works or is set up.

My wife will not be doing any of the driving. That's not even an option. She is scared to death of that.

I don't want to do the east coast because I've done it so many times already.

I would like to go at least to the bad lands. We've never seen it before.

I don't care about Mt Rushmore. To me it is graffiti.

Other than that I just want to see something that we have not seen before. I'll have my wife and my dog so I don't need much else. Everything after that is a bonus.

If you pick the Northern route to Glacier you can go to a foreign country and see Banff Lake Louise and take a ride on the Columbia Ice Fields bus. That is a great trip and not as far as California.

If you really want to go to California, just drive straight through alternating 6-8 hour shifts with your wife. One person drives, the other sleeps. Not fun, but do-able, and it gets you two lazy weeks in CA before making the same run home.

We RVed from MD to Sacramento to Los Angeles to Palm Springs to Las Vegas to Little Rock to MD in 3 weeks.

We've run coast to coast four times now. Three weeks won't cut it.

While we were working we kept our trips west of the Mississippi and into western Canada.

Only after we retired did we go coast to coast.

May I suggest you explore some of the beautiful east coast until you have more time.

A coast to coast trip like this offers almost infinite routing possibilities and opportunities to visit places when handled as a loop. One recently posted here at least twice as the "optimum road trip" got into every state in the lower 48.

The trip California is at least 6000 miles, back and forth on the shortest route to San Francisco. A loop across the midwest to San Francisco, down to LA, across the southern part of the U.S. going up through the middle South could be 7500 miles, depending on how much you want to stretch it out. Come back via the Atlantic states, maybe 9000 miles. This is a lot to cover in three weeks, you may not have time to stop to see anything, not even in California.

Find a list of "must see" places in the U.S., figure out which ones are of interest to you, start making connections between them, figuring out times and distances. You may not find any one route that works for you, but you'll get a feel for what it is that you are trying to take on.

Our RV trips have been 2-5 weeks, which has limited to a loop diameter of 1200-2000 miles, but being in the middle of the country that has let us visit almost anywhere between the Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada, but not all the way to the Pacific Coast. That's usually 200 to 800 miles a day, touring mode vs making time mode.

With 2-3 weeks max, I would go to Europe again. But I'm big on international travel, going to Europe almost every year since retiring in 2004, except the years when family deaths got in the way. For a cross country road trip loop, I think I would want at least two months, because no matter how many times I've been through certain parts of the country there are more things to see that I've not yet seen and can't treat any part of the U.S. (not even Iowa or Kansas) as "flyover" or "drive through in the night."

My kids are 24 and 30 so they wont be coming BUT my wife is a teacher so we are stuck with summer. To be honest its when I would prefer to go anyway.

CloudDriver wrote:
I'll just suggest that you head for Yellowstone. There are many good reasons why this place became the first national park in the world. Just 40 miles south of Yellowstone is Grand Teton National Park, with some of the most spectacular mountain scenery in the west. You can hit the South Dakota Badlands on the way. If you feel like heading further west and have any time left, go for it!

You haven't mentioned school age children in any of your posts. If you don't have kids in school and can get off from work in the Spring or Fall, you can avoid the high demand summer travel season. Many empty nest folks travel the shoulder seasons because it is easier to get camp sites without advance reservations and the popular destinations are less crowded. Our favorite timing for Yellowstone and Grand Teton is the first two weeks of June. We much prefer to see mountains with lots of snow still on them. We travel without advance reservations so we can stay flexible in our travels and have never had a problem. For Yellowstone, we have reserved a few days to a week ahead on a few occasions.

These are some good recommendations. Be aware that May & early June in WY, SD (Mount Rushmore) can be damp. We enjoy that time of year because it is off season. Doing the I90 tour is a good start to break in on longer journeys. You should be able to keep the long days down to 3-4 going out and 3-4 going back. Beautiful country through there and down through Yellowstone & Grand Tetons.

A doable trip with lots of scenery and fun things to do would be just head out 90. You can do the Badlands, Rushmore, Devil's Tower, Yellowstone, Tetons, and even Glacier within your time constraints. All of that could be done without killing yourself with petal to the metal driving.