Planning trip

Greyhound goes from Seattle to Baltimore in just over 2 days.....

Does not sound like fun unless you like driving down the highway with an RV. Spending half of our days driving for 10 hours at a stretch could not be further than my idea of a "vacation".

Part of my trip planning process is to lay out the locations we want to visit and then total up the mileage and divide by the number of days. If the miles are more than 200 miles per day for our trip overall then I add more days or cut out places to reduce the miles driven.

We go from Seattle to St. Louis every other year and take 16-19 days to do the round trip. Our longest driving day is 500 miles which takes 10 hours when you include stops. Typically we break the trip up into four legs and stay 2-4 nights at destination between the legs. In my opinion, the fastest route is I-90, the most scenic route is I-94 to I-90 and the most diverse route is I-80 to I-84.

Realistically speaking it can't be done. You have a minimum of 4,000 miles round trip to cover in 15 days which works out to 288 miles per day and averaging 60 MPH overall that means driving 5 hours each and every one of those 15 days.

I would fly to Portland and rent an RV and do a loop through Idaho up to Glacier NP and back through Yakima, WA to Portland. Total distance covered of 1300 miles and less two days for air travel the 13 days works out to 100 miles per day to cover with the RV.

I have rented RV's in Calgary and Anchorage and the savings in fuel and food and hotels more than compensated for the RV rental and air fare. Net net we spent 10x as much time where we wanted to be rather than tooling down the interstate and dealing with traffic and truck stops and trying to find decent places to eat.

I would head directly to the west coast and after visiting sightsee on the way back, maybe fallow the Lewis & Clark trail on the way back

is it 15 days total for when you are in the seattle and portland area, do i understand you correctly? do you want suggestions on national parks kind of thing or things like...the pikes market in seattle type of thing?

give me a shout when you are going back through my neck of the woods heading east. maybe we can meet up for lunch or something. good to see you are out and about.

on edit: what time of the year? that can change things too.

Just a few places ...

San Juan Islands
Mt St Helens
Mt Ranier
North Cascade Highway
Chinook Pass
Yakima Valley Wineries
Hells Canyon
Dry Falls
Crater Lake
Dunes at Florence, OR
Arches National Park, Utah