Peggyy said:
You all have been so helpful! Thx. It is hard to plan an itinery when you are not familiar with the area or how long each attraction will take timewise. Our main goal is the GC but we certainly want to see a few other sites along the way. It is a long drive from orlando and we only have three weeks.
I posted a summary of the Western part of our GC trip earlier....
but I'll add this
When we did it, purposely winged it a good bit. I had done tons of research for points of interest along the primary route. roadtrippers.com is a great tool for that. In our case, my wife is all about "city stops". She loves to explore new cities...museums, shopping, etc.., so my research focused a lot on that. I came up with a route and a loose itinerary of activity choices. My loose plan going in was GC as the mid-trip anchor and I wanted smaller 1/4 trip destinations as sort of "zero days"...one half way there and the other half way back. Those were harder and didn't really materialize for us.
We were very tight on time, with only slightly less than three weeks to do it so we were trying to make miles a lot. Also trying to not spend a mint on expensive overnighters so willing to do a bit of boondocking at walmart or similar. Allstays.com is great for that (found out the android app is no longer being updated). Allstays also really helped us with working around a few uncertain and unscheduled days....
Winging it to a degree really helped our adventure. We made several stops that weren't exactly planned. Worked out well to be able to adjust mid-trip.
the one thing I learned though is that I'm good for approx 2 nights in a row boondocking in places like walmart, but after that I need a CG. I find that I don't rest as well and CG's help me relax and recharge.
The other 'issue' I had which really wasn't a surprise... I'd prefer to make a plan enroute so that we have a place in mind to stop for the night...before I start getting tired. My wife isn't much of a planner/navigator so she couldn't do a very good job while I was rolling. Made for a grouchy me a few nights.... (see my earlier post about Durango, CO). That was interesting because the way it fell together we were there for a bit of exploring before dinner. If we had wasted the time to find a place to park for the night BEFORE we explored and ate, we probably would not have seen Durango. As it was, with the info we had on hand we were comfortable that we could stop at the walmart there, or find something else.... oh well.
