Road Trip USA
Get your motor runnin'
Head out on the highway
Lookin' for adventure
And whatever comes our way...
Well people, the time is here! In exactly 1 week we will be heading out for the adventure of a lifetime! We have been planning this trip for a year now and are so excited to see it come to fruition. We have made a ton of lists, looked up tourist info, got our camping gear ready, called all our friends who live far away and consulted google maps a million times. We are finishing up work, getting the house ready to lock it up, packing the car and waiting, not so patiently, on Thursday, June 7th to get here....
If you don't quite understand the premise of this trip, let me tell you....
We both have the summer off due to school and work (working for a school has its perks) schedules and knew that this was a very rare opportunity to have almost 2 months off together. We began throwing out lots of ideas on what we could do for the summer and the idea we kept coming back to was to drive across the country, with a very loose plan, and find some adventure! So we finally just made the decision that we were going to make it happen. We had a few factors to consider, first and most importantly was money. We decided that by being homeless we would be without bills, so instead of being homeless, we worked out a deal with our fabulous landlord and are rent free and therefore all our living expenses will go to our trip instead. We figured out how to work all our bills and such that we were virtually putting everything on hold here in Athens and would be able to be gypsies for those 2 months. We went through all the factors and decided on these few things:
We would drive my car, which gets great gas mileage.
We would camp at places that are very cheap or free.
We will cook almost all our meals on our tiny camping stove.
Our budget will be around 3,000 dollars.
And last, we would be very thrifty this summer.
Which means being flexible and not afraid to sleep in the car, shower in rest stops and meet the locals. We have a tentative travel plan and plans to meet friends along the way, but they know and, we know, that anything could happen and we are ready to embrace that...and ready to embrace the bugs (there are a lot of those when camping)...
So, here is our official route we will be traveling:
We depart from Athens on June 7th and are heading to the Pensacola Beach area to begin our trip with some beach time. We will be camping in a few different places, some right on the beach, and just being lazy for a few days.
June 12th-17th: Then we will head to Birmingham to see some of our sweet friends for a few days, then the 4 of us will pack into our car and drive to New Orleans for a very fun weekend of sight-seeing and eating the most delicious food we could dream of!
June 17th-23rd: Next stop, Mississippi! We will be working for a week at a LifeWay camp called Centri-Kid where we get to play with kids, see old friends and talk about Jesus for a whole week! Terrell and I worked this camp all through college and it holds such a special place in our hearts. Besides, who doesn't love camp?
June 24th: From there, we seek our ultimate destination: The Grand Canyon! We will be taking our time to get there, sight-seeing along the way and then camping in the canyon and taking in all the beauty.
We plan to spend July 4th in Colorado Springs with a lovely lady from my small group and her family and we are so excited to explore here!
Around July 9th we plan to head for DC. We will make a pit stop in Kentucky and catch up with some old camp friends and then continue our trek. This is a leg of the trip that has no time constraints and we will be stopping whenever we have the fancy to see a sight or take a nap. Once in DC, we will camp and spend time exploring this captivating city and the cities around it.
Once we have spent all the time with Lincoln that we can stand, we will begin our journey home. We will again take our time and travel down the coast and spend time on the beaches that tickle our fancy and the quaint small towns that lure us in with their timeless down towns, seaside restaurants and southern beauty.
We will arrive home sometime near the end of July, just in time to start school and work again. We are so very excited and cant wait to share lots of pictures and stories and money-saving travel tips with you, so follow along as we will post as we go!
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If you have any suggestions of where we should go or any tips please feel free to let us know!