The Great 2013 Vacation: Planning Stages

In my initial post, I said that my first goal was to talk about what our recent family vacation meant for me and that is where I will begin the festivities.  We haven't had a vacation of this magnitude for five years.  I take my vacations very seriously.  Having a plan is important because then I know how, where and when to book reservations and the like.  We made a trip out to New Jersey to see Jennifer's family 13 years ago.  Over the last few years, Jen has wanted to make a return trip, but when the economy went south, we had to settle for short, close to home excursions.  Through some blessings and some savings, we finally had the means to make the cross-country trip a reality this summer.  Basing our time frame on Ben's football practice schedule from last summer and Girl's Camp (Jennifer) and Boy Scout camp (Isaac), we realized the last two weeks of June would be our time-frame.  The plan was to fly out to New Jersey, stay for two weeks, make a side trip to Palmyra, New York during that time and fly back home.  Funny how things don't work out, but work out anyway.

 

As we started making plans, I began to see that round-trip tickets for the four of us, car rental and a hotel stay (not to mention food, gas and other costs) would make the trip expensive--possibly more so then our trip money would allow.  I had made a promise to Jennifer that we would go this year, but I was beginning to wonder how I could actually make it happen.  A new idea presented itself: make this a driving trip, spend three days in New Jersey, and visit Church history sites (Palmyra, Kirtland, Nauvoo. Far West, Liberty and Independence) on the way home.  Last summer, we had purchased an 8-man tent on sale at Bass Pro Shop.  We could stay at KOA's along the route for some of the trip and stay in hotels for the other parts.  I presented the idea to my family and they all became very excited--the idea was a "go."

 

In order to make the three days in New Jersey work, we had to get the Ringwood area in 4 days of driving (all-nighters were not an option).  Also, I wanted to make sure we didn't see the same scenery both going to and coming back from the East Coast.  Of the various options, going to NJ following the old Route 66 way made the most sense to me.  I had to break the route into sections that could be accomplished in a day's worth of driving without overtaxing us (relatively speaking).  KOA campsites became my guides to how far each day's journey would be.  With the "get there" figured out, I set to work on the "come back" plan via Church history sites.  Once I had the basic itinerary fleshed out, I took a critical look at it to make whatever tweaks I thought were necessary.

 

A few things that came into play during my refining process.  1) I started looking for LDS Temple sites along our overall route.  On previous big trips like this, we have gone on a sort of temple scavenger hunt.  I identified 9 temples along our way.  2) As I was looking for cheaper hotels in the surrounding Palmyra and Nauvoo areas, it suddenly dawned on me that it would be a great experience for Jennifer and me to visit those two temples and complete endowment sessions in both.  With this in mind, I decided it would be better to pay extra for hotels in Palmyra and Nauvoo in order to be close to the temples.  3)  Learning that a restaurant chain called Steak & Shake was going to build one of the first franchises in California in our hometown, I looked them up on the Internet and found they are all over the mid-west.  I figured we could try one to see if it was any good and I would add two more to the itinerary in case we liked the food.  4)  After booking the rental car and realizing we could make it Winslow, Arizona before needing to gas up, I learned Winslow has a statue in town dedicated to the Eagles song "Take It Easy" titled "Standin' on the Corner."  This gave me the idea to come up with "mystery places"--places along or near our travel route that I thought different family members (or all of them) would enjoy visiting.  Armed with these thoughts, I put our itinerary together, made the reservations and waited with mounting anticipation for June 14th to finally arrive.