Details, Details: Part ONE (Days 1-4)

Lovely Buena Vista, CO

I've given a big grand overview of the whole trip, but it hardly did justice to what we're about to do!

Generally, we are going to travel 5,000 miles to about 6 or 7 different destinations over 17 days and visit some friends along the way.

Philosophically, we are bringing back the Great American Family Road Trip....one mile at a time. 

Specifically, we are going to start in Nashville and end in Nashville, but here are the details for how that is going to happen:

Details, Details:  PART ONE (Days 1-4):

Day 1:  Wake in Nashville.  Do last minute things around here to get ready to leave and load car.  Mid-afternoon, we are going to make everybody potty one last time and then get in the car.  I am hoping to get out of the neighborhood before someone <cough cough...William....cough cough> asks when we are going to be there.  (This really happened the last time we drove to FL.  We had not yet left our subdivision before being asked when we would arrive.) 

We will begin driving west (YEAH!) and pass through St Louis and then Kansas City.  Dinner on night one will be "road trip style" (also known as "in the car"):  grilled chicken wraps, fruit, and some chips or cookie or something like that.  We will make a major stop for gas and a restroom break sometime around 9:00 pm as the last call before we make everybody comfy up for the night. 

We plan to drive straight through to Buena Vista, CO, our first stop, so the children will sleep through the night while Michael & I leapfrog the driving responsibilities.  One will drive and drink Red Bull while the other rests, then we'll swap off so everybody catches some cat naps through the night.  Yes, we will be tired.  No, we will not risk anything stupid--if we are both "done" with the driving, we will find a place to pull off and sleep for a bit.  The reason we are doing this is because there's just not a heck of a lot to see between Nashville and the Rocky  Mountains that we are excited about.  We've been to both Kansas City and St Louis and they are lovely, but not where we want to end up, so we're just going to plow through and drive in order to get as far west as we can while the children are sleeping and we can keep the "are we there yet?" questions to a minimum.

Day 2:  Wake in the van somewhere in Kansas or Colorado. Our initial destination is Buena Vista, CO.  It is 1,250 miles from Nashville, which according to the google maps app should take just over 20 hours for us to arrive (always subject to the amount of bathroom breaks we take).  This means we should arrive to our campground sometime mid-day.  Breakfast that morning is going to be the L-WOW healthy banana muffins that I've made ahead (whoop whoop! Looky here, I'm not procrastinating!).  When we arrive at our campground, we will go set up our tent, the children will be ready to take a swim and the adults will be ready to crash.  We will limp through the afternoon as best we can, get some groceries/restock the cooler if necessary, and eat dinner at a restaurant.  We will all be pretty tired (even the kids who should have slept most of the night in the car--that's not exactly quality sleep, you know) so as soon as it's dark outside, we will crash for the night.

Day 3:  Wake in Buena Vista, CO  Here's where we get a little fuzzy on specifics.  I'll throw out our "bucket list" of things we would like to do, knowing full well, that we will have to make cuts. 

• Drive to Vail (78 miles) or Breckenridge (60 miles) and ride a ski lift/explore a ski resort town
• Drive to Colorado Springs (93 miles) and see/hike Pikes Peak
• Rafting
• See a real.live.animal.in.its.real.live.environment. (from a distance, of course! don't be silly!)  Goat? Bear?  Elk?

Day 4:  Wake in Buena Vista, CO We will finish exploring/crossing off items off our bucket list and go to sleep that night exhausted.   The campground we are staying at is costing $125 for all 3 nights.  While I'm not exactly thrilled to be camping, I do realize that we could not afford to do this trip if we were staying at hotels all the way, so I'm sacrificing and getting WAY out of my comfort zone (can you hear the violins playing?) in order to make this trip happen. 

Up next......the Grand Canyon!  I'll post about Days 5-7 next time!