Summer Road Trips

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Permalink Reply by minnemom on May 8, 2009 at 6:04am

I have two roadtrips planned this summer, one to North Dakota and one to Iowa. Even though you don't think of North Dakota as a vacation spot, I filled 7.5 days with stops, and that's only covering the western half of the state!

When I'm trip-planning, I always google the visitors bureaus for where I'm going, e.g. Bismarck visitors, to find links to local hotels and activities and sometimes even coupons or specials.

A map program like Microsoft Streets and Trips or one of the online map sites helps me lay out distances and driving times.

I love Roadside America, too. On my summer to-see list are the world's largest Holstein cow, buffalo, walleye, and sandhill crane. :-)

Linda

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Permalink Reply by TravelSavvyMom on May 13, 2009 at 2:03pm

Just shorties: a two-day jaunt to Yosemite, and then a blitz down to San Diego for a week. I love the idea of going out of our way and stopping at little strange places, but on the other hand I also love the idea of getting an epidural and driving 90 all the way.

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Permalink Reply by michelleduffy on June 3, 2009 at 1:00pm

ROFL at Jamie's "epidural and driving 90 all the way" :)

We'll be road-tripping from Seattle to Santa Barbara in August.
I hadn't heard of Roadside America but it looks worth checking out - thanks for the tip.
I have use the trip planner on the Rand McNally website which I found pretty good http://www.randmcnally.com/rmc/road/rtgHome.jsp. But then again, my road trip experience is pretty anemic since 90% of my vacation time is spent visiting family outside the US.

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Permalink Reply by minnemom on June 9, 2009 at 6:22pm

I survived 11 days and 1835 miles with my kids, ages 8, 6, and 5 (our 3yo stayed with Grandma and Hubby stayed home to farm) touring North Dakota. I never knew my home state had so much to see.

Now on to planning an Iowa trip. Hubby says we can't take a "big" vacation this summer since we road-tripped to Philadelphia at Christmas time, but he didn't say we couldn't visit adjacent states...

I also use Microsoft Streets and Trips to plan my routes; it seems to have the easiest way of figuring mileage, timing, stops, etc., especially for a big itinerary.

Linda

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Permalink Reply by Karen (Scattered Mom) on August 2, 2009 at 10:49am

Oh, fun! We could have used the tip about Starbucks Mobile when we were on holidays. We road trip every summer through the USA, usually going about 8000+ kms and through 8 or 9 states. This year we went to:

-Bozeman, MT
-Rapid City, SD
-Moab, UT
-Salt Lake City, UT
-Bend, OR

It was a lot of fun. I'm still posting about it over at my blog, Notes From the Cookie Jar We like to do a lot of adventure stuff like rock hounding, 4x4ing in the desert, etc. When searching for hotels I especially like to check Trip Advisor.

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Permalink Reply by Marina K. Villatoro on August 15, 2009 at 7:55am

We did a road trip in Guatemala with the family. We went to Lake Atitlan which is one of the most beautiful volcanic lake craters in the world with 3 volcanoes surrounding it.

http://travelexperta.com

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