Later this month, Susie and I will be hitting the road again. Well, that’s not totally honest, what we will be doing is hitting the road, the air, and the seas, as we journey from Ocean City to the Philadelphia 
International Airport (the road portion), and from there fly via American Airlines to Houston, Texas (the air portion), then take an Uber or Lyft from George Bush International Airport to Galveston, Texas (another road portion), where we will meet up with Royal Caribbean’s Liberty of the Seas (obviously, the sea portion). Sorry you asked?
As you will recall, youngest son Kenny and his husband Chris are Entertainers on the Liberty of the Seas, and we sign on towards the end of this month for another 2 week back-to-back visit with Our Boys. By the time we leave the ship, they will have less than a month left on their contract, and not knowing if they will do another contract on a ship, this may be our last time to sail with them. We are, of course, looking forward to seeing the boys, watching them perform, and experiencing the various ports they’ve been traveling to since they signed on early this year, but this trip will be different than any other of the many cruises we’ve been on with them. That’s because this time, we won’t be alone!
While we will spend 2 weeks on the ship, for week one we will be joined by my cousin Jeanne Pratt and her husband Walt! Jeanne is the daughter of my Mom’s 2 year younger brother Bill, and grew up in Chicago. We didn’t spend a lot of time together as kids, but she has to be the person in the world that has known me longer than anyone else in my life. There were trips to Chicago for me, and visits from her family to New York, and a couple of memorable Family Vacations in Florida. As often happens, as we all got older, and life picked up pace, we drifted apart. 40 years ago, Jeanne and Walt were at our wedding, but after that, our connections were very sporadic. The sad part was that Walt spent 25 years in the Navy, and they lived for most of that time in Connecticut as Walt was in the Submarine Service. After he retired from the Navy, that’s where their home stayed, so for the better part of our married lives, the 4 of us were less than 100 miles apart!
After years of not being in each other’s lives, about 5 or 6 years ago, we met mid way between Long Island and their Connecticut home for lunch. We had a great lunch but mostly we talked…so much so that the restaurant folks looked like they were going to throw us out so they could begin setting up for dinner! Since that rekindling, we have visited them in their Florida home in Barefoot Bay, they’ve stayed with us in Ocean City, we’ve had dinner with them while in Disney World with the boys, they’ve visited us in Indian Rocks Beach, and every time the result is the same..we talk, and talk, and talk and talk!
Last year, Jeanne wondered if there might be some place we could vacation together. Shortly after we booked our back-to-back cruise for this month (a back-to-back is taking the same room for two different cruise itineraries, making the two one week cruises in essence a two week cruise), she called and wondered if we’d like some company for the first week. Sounded like a great idea to us, so we are now adding cruising as yet another way we are spending time together. We’re not going to be tied at the hip, but we will be eating and drinking together a lot (food and drink packages ordered), seeing the boys in the shows (by the way, they will get to meet each other for the first time), and just hanging out and talking! Imagine that!
Stay tuned as we continue with more pre-travel arrangements!
1 – The AAA. As long time members of the American Automobile Club, we have always used AAA Maps and Tour Books as our road trip bibles. If you are of a certain age, you will understand what we mean when we say there is just something about watching your progress on a paper map that seems to define a road trip. Luckily, some of the best paper maps you can get, are published by the AAA, and are a perk of your membership. In addition to the maps, the tour books have a wealth of knowledge about tourist destinations as well as hotel and restaurants listings in the area. If you are an AAA member, you can order maps, tour books and even triptiks (route directions) online. You can also just stop into a local AAA office (doesn’t have to be the state AAA you are affiliated with) and pick up maps, tour books, and even triptiks. Having a paper map in front of you so that you can check the location and relationships between places you want to visit is a must when planning a trip, and the tour books will give you valuable information about the places on your trip and be very helpful in deciding what you want to visit. If you are a member, stop in and pick up a couple of maps and tour books and start planning. If you are not a member, consider joining, as the price of your membership will be well worth it for the information you can get. (aaa.com….yearly membership $52)
2 – Atlas – Because many people would not consider a road trip without a comprehensive road atlas, we purchased a Rand McNally Road Atlas. This one volume contains maps of all 50 states and lower Canada and assures us that we will always have a map showing our location, wherever we are in the US. The scale is smaller than the AAA maps which sometimes makes it hard to figure out exactly what you’re looking at, but sometimes makes it easier to see the relationship between two destinations. While we’ve used this volume a lot in our planning, for our actual trip we think it will take a back up roll to the bigger scale AAA maps.
3 – Books – One of the things that you need to do when you are planning a road trip, is to decide what you want to see. If you have a “bucket list” of places that you want to include (like Frank wants to see Mt. Rushmore and Sue Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon), it will make your planning easier, as you already will have destinations in mind. If your “bucket list” is empty, or if you need more information about places, there are thousands of travel books you can purchase via Amazon or at a book store like Barnes and Noble that will help you flesh out an itinerary. Two that we have used are, “1,000 Places to See in the US and Canada Before You Die” (Workman Publishing, NY) and The New Roadside America (a Fireside Book published by Simon and Schuster, NY). The first covers everything from National Parks, historic sites, scenic byways, and the like, while the second will lead you to the odd things…like the biggest thermometer, ball of twine and those kind of offbeat attractions.
6 – Google Maps – Looking at places on a map gives you an idea of where they are and the relationship of places to each other, but how do you know how long it will take you to get from say Chicago to the Black Hills? This was the position we were in when planning some sections of our trip, and we found an easy way to get a ball park estimate was to use Google Maps. Enter your starting point and your destination, ask for directions, and it will tell you not only the mileage but give you an idea of the driving time. Now, we know that it’s not fool proof, but we think it’s a good way to get an estimate so that you can make some decisions based on facts.
6- GPS – While we like printed maps, we always travel with a Garmin GPS on our dash. It’s very handy when you are trying to find a hotel or site that you have an address for, and good to give you an idea exactly where you are. In addition, ours tells us what the local speed limit is, how fast we’re going, and also keeps us updated on traffic. We don’t depend on it totally, as we always try to have maps as a reference, and I’ve read on the internet that using a GPS in the American Southwest is iffy at best, as they are notoriously inaccurate there for some reason, but it’s a good tool to have in your tool box.
We started by collecting AAA Tour Books for most of the states. We also have added a couple of books with listing of things you absolutely must see across the United States. Some are wacky, like the World’s Largest Ball of String, but many are just not to be missed attractions. Susie has been going through the books taking notes, and the last two days we have both been working diligently on the tour books, and putting together a list of MUSTS for the trip. We also figured that places like Chicago or Detroit were close enough to the East Coast to be other shorter trips, and our intention is to concentrate on more of the Western United States. We figured to head west on a northern route, and return east on a more southern route, hopefully keeping summer weather with us for most of the journey. The first “must” we planned on hitting was Mount Rushmore, to satisfy Frank’s long desire to see it in person (too many viewings of North by Northwest).
While our plan is to basically wander in the general direction of the west coast, we understand that to stay in some places that are on the “Must List” of ours, we were going to need reservations. Three of those places are Yellowstone National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and Monument Valley. We’ve read online that reservations at these 3 places need to be made months in advance, but figured that as we were 5-6 months out from our dates, we were still within the window of opportunity. Yesterday afternoon, we discovered that we didn’t have all the time in the world, and that our window of opportunity was about to slam shut! So our trip, that before yesterday was still kind of in the imaginary stage, just moved into the realm of reality! We discovered that there were very few availabilities left, and that if we wanted to stay on-site in these three places, we needed to act ASAP. Needing to make those reservations meant that we had to really look at the trip in earnest, decide what we really wanted to see, and forced us to actually come up with a timeline, while still leaving lots of open time to just check out neat looking things and places along the way.
R New Adventures 