We're (almost) off!

We're leaving in about ten days for our (projected) seven week trip through the Great Plains states. We're thinking of calling it "Antiques Road Show" because we're 65 and 56, our transportation, Van O'White, is 17, and our eldest dog, Nick, is 14. We hope the little ones, Stella, who is five and three-year old Ollie, will be patient with us.

Here we are at the beach last summer:

Our route, if we make it the whole way, will go something(!) like this:

Tampa - Tallahssee- Mobile (outskirts) - Jackson (outskirts) - Memphis - Branson- Independence - Des Moines - Clear Lake- Mount Rushmore - Wisconsin Dells - Springfield, IL - LandBetweenTheLakes and home again. If we don't kill each other first. There's a lot of wiggle room in there for detours to various "Little House" locations which we have recently become obsessed with. I read all the Laura Ingalls works as a kid, but Joyce didn't, and just now we have both (re)read them. So we'll be stopping here and there to see the sites/sights. We only have three "real" reservations where we plan to stop for a week at a time. For example, we'll be a week, including Memorial Day, in Custer, South Dakota, because we don't want to travel on that weekend. Another week in Wisconsin and a third in Kentucky. The rest of the time, we'll just amble along and give the kids a chance to poop all over the Great Plains. We will also stop and see friends we first met on the internet.

So we'll see how we like an extended road trip. and if we survive, maybe we'll take another one someday. Joyce just thought, in this economy, it would be better to do a "pay as you go" more or less trip, instead of having to plunk down megabucks all at once.

Stay tuned!