Road Trip Planner Apps

Yosemite Sam1 wrote:
This is how I want to to it.

I hope you don't mind if I copy.

I was a strategic planner in my corporate world and have done so far with our European, Asian and all our camping trips so far. But it's pain with the domino effect of cancellation.

I want to be spontaneous and flexibility -- like when we used to do it weekends.

And thanks for that wonderful insight!

That's the funny thing about planning, isn't it? Some people spend so much time planning during their day to day lives that the thought of having to stick to a rigid plan sounds horrific. And I'm with you on the domino effect.

On the other hand, I see people who absolutely love planning every aspect of their trips. I think that for them the act of planning builds the anticipation and is practically as enjoyable as the trip itself.

I'd much rather be spontaneous. We miss out on things once in a while because we hadn't booked something or researched in time, but that's a chance we're willing to take.

On our big trip last fall we had a very short list of scheduled constraints:

- We needed to make it to the mountains above Taos to meet some family members for Labor Day weekend.

- We had to get out son to Denver after that to fly back to start school.

- We needed to get to Sandusky, OH by the following weekend because Cedar Point amusement park was only open on weekends after Labor Day.

- We had to be home by a certain date in October because we had tickets to see Peter Frampton's farewell tour with friends.

Everything else was spontaneous and flexible. I would have added another week or two onto the trip if we didn't have that firm commitment at the end. We really had to high-tail it home from North Dakota and the weather had turned bad. We made it through the heavy winds in Wyoming (blew out our bedroom window) and the snow in Nevada and managed to have one buffer day to catch our breath in Bishop up in the Sierras before we met our friends on the Central Coast in CA.

The trip was a blast and I don't regret many things about it. And even as long as we were gone, I wish we could have spent more time in places we didn't expect to love so much (southern Indiana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin).