Where to go? What to see? What to do? What route to take? Which places to avoid (at all costs) and which places to make it to (no matter what)? These were only a few of the many questions that Brett and I asked ourselves as we planned this road trip. I had read several travel blogs about other people’s road trips investigating where they went and what they did - however, it was always a mystery as to why they chose the places that they did. I couldn’t base any part of my road trip on other people’s if I didn’t know what prompted them to put one place over another on their route. So, we scrapped the ideas, routes and places that other people had traveled and went back to the drawing board.

We took a Saturday morning and separately we both picked 50 places in the U.S. and Canada that we wanted to visit. We opted to limit our road trip to the U.S. and Canada because there are too many places in Mexico and Central America that we want to go, that we felt it is beyond the scope of what we are hoping to get out of this road trip. We may go there afterward, but we want to make it separate. We reviewed the lists and, to no surprise, most of the places we chose overlapped. We placed the sites on a map and decided on a course to see the majority of them - the ones that mattered. Numerous sites are along the coasts, a few in the Southwest, several more in the Northwest, with many of the remaining sites in the Northeast. Neither of us had many picks in the South and we have seen the sites in the Midwest. With our “where to go?” question answered, we were ready to move on to “what route to take?”.

Figuring out the route proved to be quite fun. We first thought about zig zagging the U.S. East to West and then West to East back and forth while working North to South to see all of the sites. But with so many of them concentrated on the coasts, we decided instead to drive the length of each coast to see our chosen spots. The majority of the remaining spots could be seen on one of two routes, the first was easier to decide upon than the latter. We opted to take Route 66 West. This decision was easy for a few reasons. First, Route 66 begins in Chicago which is relatively close to where we are beginning our journey. Second, we wanted to drive the entire length of the Pacific coast, not bisect it and drive it in two or more segments. Route 66 ends in L.A. but a detour could get us to San Diego to begin the next leg of our journey without too much hassle. The remaining chosen sites for our road trip would be much harder to see on a direct route - so we opted out of a direct route and planned a route based solely on our sites of interest. The route go from the Pacific ocean to the Atlantic ocean, starting in Vancouver, British Columbia and ending in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We drive as far South as Utah and Colorado and as far North as Calgary in Alberta, Canada on this leg of the journey. It is not direct or quick in any sense, but it accomplishes the goal of seeing the spots that we want to see. And really, isn’t that what the point of this road trip is about anyway?

We feel really good about having answered the major questions of “where to go?” and “what route to take?” and we have moved on to the fun question of “what to see?”. We are both looking forward to this trip immensely and can’t wait to get started. We hope to be able to update the site from the road weekly, but we’ll wait and see how it goes once we get moving.