ROAD TRIP: ROUTE PLANNING | my momma heart

Welcome to our Road Trip Series! If you are just joining, start here or scroll down for links to all the Road Trip Series posts.

I have been accused of planning too much. Whatever. It feels good to start out with a plan BUT I’m also a momma living real life with three kids who also have their own expectations so flexibility is key. Honestly, having kids was the best thing for me in this respect. It didn’t take me long to realize if I walked into situations with firm expectations, I ended up not having fun and was a crab and my kids didn’t have fun. Lame. No one wants that. So, while I love having a plan, and I also try to set us up for being ready for some of the things that are unexpected (hello, carrying swim suits everywhere), I’ve become way more relaxed about saying yes to changes in the plan. Let’s be real, some of those unexpected changes lead to some awesome adventures.

So, first things first. I made a calendar with the 4-ish weeks that we were going to be gone. I need a visual and I also needed it to be tactile so I printed it. Having something to physically write on helps me organize better. Our trip was going to start on a Saturday and overlap months and I just wanted it all in once place. I made a table in Microsoft Word and added the dates. Do what works for you. My calendar weeks actually started on a Saturday (the day we left) and ended with a Sunday which was when we planned to return. I penciled in the knowns; arrive in Iowa the following Sunday and the days we had booked in Door County, WI with friends at the end of the trip.

After that, I pulled up Bing Maps and got to work. This part gets a little messy. I played with the times and locations of where we wanted to end up on our drive days. With Bing you can set times you might leave or when you want to arrive. It helped us account for traffic and we found it to be pretty accurate. We wanted to camp in Yellowstone and South Dakota since we were having extended stays in both places. Our first day on the road was really, just on the road. We drove straight through to Bozeman and stayed at hotel there. We made this day the longest drive day (on the way to the Midwest, anyway). We figured we’d all be really excited and fresh and rested and it’d make for an easy drive. It also meant that we could wake up the next morning and only be a few hours from Yellowstone. This was important to us because we were camping and preferred to set-up and get settled in well before dinner time.

After our time in Yellowstone, we’d be heading to South Dakota and didn’t have a lot planned for between the two, except for Devil’s Tower. We could have taken the interstate the whole way, but what fun would that have been? Looking at the map, I saw we’d be close to the Bighorn Mountains and that there were a couple of byways that crossed through. One was the Bighorn Scenic Byway and the other was Cloud Peak Skyway. I literally made the decision based on the fact that Cloud Peak Skyway was an awesome name. This ended up leading us to one of the coolest impromptu adventures we had on the trip so I’d say, that this time, choosing the awesome name worked in our favor. It added hours to our trip that day but it was worth it and I knew we’d be able to get out and stretch our legs often as the byways typically have plenty of pull-outs with information and beautiful views. We decided to stay the night in Buffalo after the drive. More on this awesome adventure in a later post!

From there we knew we were going to Devil’s Tower and decided to camp at Custer State Park while exploring South Dakota. There are not a ton of routes for this drive but we did want to make sure we took Needles Highway so added it to our route.

After camping in South Dakota, we wanted to visit Badlands National Park and then stay at a hotel for a night before getting to our Iowa destination where we were meeting family for several days.

Once we had decided on all the stops, we booked hotels and campsites. Bing Maps has the option of showing hotels along your route and that gave us a good starting point for our hotel stays. We intentionally planned hotel stays to bookend our camping trips. This gave us a night for everyone to get a good night’s sleep and a hot shower. It also meant a meal at a restaurant for dinner and breakfast at the hotel in the morning. You could certainly do some grocery shopping instead of eating meals out to save money, but after camp cooking for several days, I knew I’d be ready for something someone else prepared. Our requirements for hotels were just that they had hot breakfast, could accommodate 3 children, and had laundry on-site. There were a couple hotels on our way east that actually didn’t accommodate 3 kids (even though they said they did when we booked online) so we brought in a sleeping bag and pad for the 4-year-old and that seemed to work just fine.

I’ll talk more about our packing in a separate blog, but it was important for us to have hotels with laundry on-site. We used the evening at our hotels to do laundry and swap out supplies. Remember our first camping trip had a overnight low of 25 degrees and our next camping stop would be around 85 degrees. We wanted to be able to do all our laundry and put it in the cargo box and bring the next set of clothing down. This also saved us so much time when we got back home. I had a giant duffle filled with winter/warm clothes, hats, gloves, plus our quilts that were already washed. We already had loads and loads of laundry to do so not having to do all of the winter gear saved me a ton of time during reentry to real life.

Depending on your family situation, you might also want to consider these things when planning your route:

rest areas/bathrooms locations
parks or other areas to run around
restaurants if you aren’t going to eat in the car
areas of interest you might to pull-off to see
nap times – You might want to stick to interstates for these hours to help keep the littles sleeping.

After the accommodations were booked, it was time to move on to planning how we’d keep the kids busy, the food situation (that pesky little detail), and what we’d be doing during our longer stays. Stay tuned for the posts about activities at each place and the rest of the planning details.

Follow along with us to see how we planned, prepped, and what adventures we had along the way.