So I've been annoying my lovely wife lately with some inordinately long term plans for a vacation. Over a year in advance I turned in a form to HR requesting vacation time for October 2010. Yes, another roadtrip is in the works. This time we will be accompanied by someone small and less patient, so we are planning shorter legs of each journey than last time, but all should go well we think.

Here's the route as planned:



Leaving from Kansas City, we'll make our first stop in Liberal, Kansas. A short visit to the Liberal Air Museum, and then on the next day to Tucumcari, New Mexico. A long day of driving follows landing us on the south rim of the Grand Canyon for an evening, and then straight on to Los Angeles the next day. A few days with family, and of course, the requisite Disneyland stopover, and then on up the coast, a Danish breakfast in Solvang, and then a couple nights on the coast in San Simeon. Then we start trudging back, first making a short trip across central California and stopping in less-than-aesthetically-exemplary Barstow, California. Then, on to some cabins in Zion National Park where we'll enjoy a scenic couple of days. We travel then across Utah, and stop in Glenwood Springs at a hotel on the banks of the Colorado River, on the western side of the Rockies. The next day we cut our return journey in half by stopping in Hays, Kansas after crossing the Rockies and the vast plains of eastern Colorado, and finally make it home after a short drive from Hays.

Yep, this should keep me going for another year. Perhaps vacation savings would be better in a Roth IRA or with some other Irish nationalist faction or group, but we do like our road trip vacations.