Before we left we were told we were crazy nuts. Just asking for trouble!

She said: "Pack it all, ship it ... including your car ... and fly ... you and the dog."

We said: "Well that would be expensive ...And besides what would be the fun in that?" And "Shelbie would freak out."

We were looking forward to the fun of travel. We love road trips and we'd never been on one just us, and V had a new car, and the dog would be happier, and we were really looking forward to seeing the land, and... etc.

(But Billy, my spousal unit, did check it out and estimated that it would probably cost us at least $2000 more than driving and then shipping everything else later.)

Soooo we planned ahead in a fairly careful fashion.

By Thanksgiving we knew the family was right: We didn't know diddly about driving in snow and ice - We're Texans, after all. So, we were definitely not driving up through Denver and crossing over the Great Divide. So should we take 40 out past the Grand Canyon or do the unthinkable and drive south to El Paso and go across on 10? We were suspicious of 40 ... quite a bit of elevation ... and it does snow ...

We got into a little habit -- well actually we started using our Starbucks networking habit. We started asking everyone who sat down near us if they traveled by car on a regular basis to Southern California or even to Phoenix -- during the winter. Finally we found someone who has children in Southern California. He told us that it's not unusual for some part of 40 to close during the winter and that he'd only had trouble on 10 once. ... So 10 it was.

It just seemed like an awful lot of extra driving ... an extra 140 miles ... but ... then getting stuck somewhere dealing with weather didn't sound good either.

We carefully researched our hotel options as well at PetsWelcome.com. Traveling with a dog was complicating that a bit. We also know toyed with the idea of camping a few nights ... but that sounded like extra labor and extra load ... until we hit upon the KOA Kamping Kabins! Untimately, we decided on some KOA Kamping Kabins and several hotels and even a cabin one night.

We were quite pleased with ourselves ... with tax and all it was suppose to be somewhere near $350 for 8 nights lodging -- $400 if we stayed an extra night somewhere.

We did a little bit of scenery research ... but most of that research was about our options re the Grand Canyon National Park if we went that way ... we never really quite got around to the whole "know your landmarks" research that most road-trippers do.

Pretty much the only clues we had about what to expect re scenery was the scenery we'd seen around the hotels on their various the web sites.

And we had a Driving Plan

Tuesday, December 30, 2003
Dallas, TX to Van Horn, TX
Route: 20 to 10
Mileage: 518

Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Van Horn, TX to Phoenix, AZ
Route: 10
Mileage: 550

Thursday, January 1, 2003
Phoenix, AZ to Bakersville, CA
Route: 10 to 95 to 40 to 58
Mileage: 519

Friday, January 2, 2004
Bakersville, CA to Santa Cruz, CA
Route: 46 to 1
Mileage: 284

Saturday, January 3, 2004
Santa Cruz, CA to Crescent City, CA(Redwoods)
Route: 101
Mileage: 430

Sunday, January 4, 2004
Crescent City, CA to Portland, OR
Route: 101 to 126 to 5
Mileage: 284

Google Maps estimates that this is 2,656 miles and 44 hrs of driving. You can see the route all spread out on Google Maps


So ... we were set ...had a plan ... all we had to do was follow the plan.

What is it? ... those sayings about plans ...

"Best laid plans of mice and men ...." - they do something but not a great something ...
The other that comes to mind is ...
"Man plans, God laughs"