Ever since I was a kid, I’ve dreamed of taking a road trip out west. Once Micah and I got together, we made several trips out there, by plane, to visit family and friends. I had been to Oregon, took a day trip up to Washington once. We had visited Sacramento, San Francisco and Lake Tahoe in California. These were all amazing trips, but I never wanted to move to any place I’d visited (except the Caribbean) until I fell in love with Southern California when I visited for the first time in 2014. Ever since then I’ve talked about moving out there.

My kids were not at all liking the idea of us moving away from Indiana, but I do not at all like the idea of staying in Indiana. SOOOO, I decided that we needed to get them out to California so they could see how beautiful and fun it is there. Along the way we wanted them to be able to see some of the amazing sights that this country has to offer, as well

I decided It was finally time to take that long awaited road trip out west. My parents had always wanted to make a trip like that as well, so we began our planning progress by inviting them to go along.

Our plan began with “what is the cheapest way to get us to Cali?” Our original thought on that was to drive there and camp along the way, then camp at the beach when we got there. Which is still a dream of mine, to camp at the beach as well as at some of the amazing places we visited on this trip. Ultimately, though, we didn’t end up doing the camping thing this time around. My parents have a camper, we do not. At the time we first began talking about this trip, their camper was big enough for all of us. By the time we actually took the trip, they had traded that one in on a fifth-wheel that is like a mini one bedroom apartment on wheels. It is very nice and perfect for them, but only sleeps 4, not 7. So that idea was out.

We looked into renting an RV as well. While renting RVs isn’t very expensive, they do have a mileage limit that is included, when you go over that, you pay extra per mile. For example: On Cruise America we could rent a 7 passenger RV for around $1260. 1400 miles is included, after that it’s 35 cents per mile. Our round trip was going to be about 1,000 more than that so add another $350 to that, plus taxes, fees, gas, and campsite rentals. (Beachside campsites were renting for $75-100/night.) We decided that this wasn’t really the cheapest way to go after all.

So we decided on a regular road trip, staying in hotels, VRBOs and homeaway rentals along the way.

Now that we had decided on how we would get there, we began discussing dates. I don’t remember exactly how or when we decided on the dates, but we ended up planning to do it over the kids’ fall break from school. (Which perfectly started the weekend of our wedding anniversary! We orignally planned to leave on Friday, the 13th! But ended up leaving Sat, 10/14/17…ON our 17th anniversary!) We took the entire two weeks off, so I had 14 days to play around with while deciding what we would see and do on our trip.

Around the beginning of the year, (or more realistically, around mid March; after all the kid’s bdays were over) I began the true planning! Time to decide all the fun places to visit along the way. To decide this, I just opened Google Maps and set my directions to Oceanside, CA. It showed at least three possible routes. Of course, I look at the shortest or fastest routes first. But I’m also checking what other states we will be passing through as well.

I also did a Google search and a facebook poll on
“Things to see on a road trip out west”.

Here are some of the suggestions we got:
Four corners
Grand Canyon
Route 66
Hoover dam
Meteor Crater
Southern Utah (Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, Antelope Canyon, Death Valley)
Survivor Tree in Oklahoma City
Petrified Forest
Pike’s Peak
Sequoia National Park
San Fransisco
Down the coastal highway
L.A.
Palm Beach
Las Vegas

I spent some time researching each of the suggested places. Of course I knew I wanted to visit most, if not all, of these places so I first added them all, just to see where we were at with that. Obviously that was going to take way too long so we needed to narrow down the list.

I showed the list to the family. The Four corners and Grand Canyon were places the kids MOST DEFINITELY knew they wanted to see. I had always wanted to see Vegas, and I knew we’d be close so we added that to the list. Once I looked up all the places in Southern Utah , I knew we had to go through those because they looked absolutely stunning. Colorado was another stop I wanted to make so our list was starting to take shape.

When I looked at the directions to Oceanside, it gave me two different route options. I liked the northern route because it went through Colorado and
Southern Utah. We wanted to take a different route home, so I originally planned to do the southern most route on the way home.

Once we had a tentative list of stops and basic routes chosen, I went back to Google Maps and started adding stops to my directions to Oceanside. (When you add stops, make sure you select the box that says “reorder my stops”, this will put them in the best order for driving from point A, to point B, to C, etc.)

Here was our original list of stops we wanted to make:
Four corners
Grand Canyon
Route 66
Hoover dam
Meteor Crater
Southern Utah (Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, Antelope Canyon, Death Valley)
Survivor Tree in Oklahoma City
Petrified Forest
coastal highway
Las Vegas

Once I plugged in all the stops, it seemed doable.

I started researching each of the places we wanted to visit. I would look at as much info as I could to see about how long I thought we would spend at each place. (Sometimes when I looked up a place, there was a box on the right with info in it that would have the average time spent there, but I would always still look myself and decide what we would want to do while there, to determine how long it might take us.)

My parents had a dog at the time that they couldn’t leave with anyone for very long because she had been having pretty bad seizures. So they decided they needed to take their dogs, so our trip had to include pet friendly places to stay and visit. That made it a bit of a challenge, but taking their dogs meant we might as well take Milo too, which saved us on pet sitting fees. I’m not going to lie, I loved the idea of taking Milo because I didn’t want to be away from him for two weeks. However, I would not have chosen to take him, if my parents weren’t going and taking theirs. I knew that if we couldn’t take the dogs, my parents were fine with keeping the dogs while we went exploring. So it was a win win. Micah did not agree. The main thing we argued about while planning the trip was the fact we were taking dogs. In the end, my parents wouldn’t have it any other way, so he did not win that one. lol

We weren’t going to have much time to spend in each place, 1-2 days each. So first off, I had to eliminate some of the places on the Utah list because, even though I decided we’d stay two nights there instead of just one, it still wouldn’t be enough time to do it all. Antelope Canyon looks so amazing and I really hated to eliminate it, but I read that it takes a long time to get to the best parts of it, and we couldn’t take pets, plus my parents weren’t into hiking too much, so that was best saved for a time when it’s just us. We ended up choosing to visit Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park.
(We definitely want to take another trip to Southern Utah sometime to explore more of the places we missed and revisit Bryce and Zion! We could easily spend a week there!)

I knew I wanted to visit Colorado , but didn’t really have a preference of a certain city to visit. Just knowing we were going to be driving all the way through the state, in the Fall, was good enough for me, so I zoomed in on
Colorado and wrote down all the cities we we would driving through on the route I already had. My parents also had said they didn’t want to drive more than 8-9 hours each day, so I focused on things that were about 16-18 hours from home. I pretty quickly found that we would be going near The Great Sand Dunes National Park. Home of the countries largest dunes. Micah LOVES sand dunes so I knew that had to be the place to visit in CO. It also happens to be 18 hours away, so it was perfect!

I spent LOTS of hours routing and re-routing our trip. Our goal was to spend at least 5 nights on the beach in California, once we got there. So that left the remaining 9 days to make our stops. We had finally narrowed down our list to just Colorado, Bryce canyon, Zion, Four Corners, Grand Canyon and Vegas. We also had to make one stop between home and CO. I researched things to see in Kansas and realized that The Wizard of Oz museum was on or pretty near our route. Since Makensie and my dad are huge OZ fans, I knew that would be a perfect pit stop for us on our first day. So Kansas made our route complete.

After researching the places we wanted to visit, we decided that most of the things we wanted to see were on the Northern Route. It didn’t make much sense to travel the Southern Route at all, so we decided to take the same route on the way out and way home. We wanted to stay 2 nights in Utah and 2 nights in Vegas, and only 1 night each in Kansas, Colorado, Arizona. Now we were at 7 nights… leaving 7 nights for California. I needed to work the route for 4 nights on the way out, then 7 in Cali, then 3 on the way home.

I worked and re-worked the route many times. I was having a hard time because the first night had to be Kansas, 2nd night Colorado, then Utah. But since we wanted two nights there, we were already at night 4 and still too far away from California to make it by night 5. To save Utah for the end would mean staying the first three nights in Kansas, Colorado, Arizona. Then a week in Cali, then 2 nights Vegas…2 nights Utah. WAIT…that won’t work either, unless we take the nights in Cali down to 5. Ok, that’s doable.

Then we started thinking about how exhausting Vegas can be. We didn’t really want to have a relaxing week on the beach and then go to Vegas on the way home. No matter how I routed it, Vegas had to be on the way out, but that wasn’t really working either.

Also it just seemed silly to pass some of our places on the way out, but not stop until the way home. And then it HIT ME!! Why not Rent a car and make the drive out…Take the entire first week to do all of our fun sightseeing, then spend a full week relaxing on the beach (with a day trip to L.A. in the middle) and then FLY HOME!! It was ultimately the best decision ever. It was such an amazing drive out there, especially once we got into Colorado and beyond. But it was SO nice to be able to just hop on a plane at the end of two amazing weeks and be home in 7 hours.

In the end, this was the itinerary I came up with:
Sat 10/14/17 Depart Indiana 5:00 AM
Visit Oz Museum – two hours – then drive 4 more hours; one night in Kansas.
Sun: Drive to Colorado, Visit Great Sand Dunes NP, Stay for one night.
Monday: Drive to Four Corners, then onto Utah. Check into Cabin.
Tuesday: Visit Bryce Canyon, stay 2nd night.
Wednesday: Visit Zion NP, then head to Arizona. Stay one night in AZ.
Bonus: We passed Horseshoe Canyon on the way so we got to make an extra stop to see it! Another amazing sight to see. 🙂
Thursday: Visit Grand Canyon, then head to Vegas!
Another Bonus: We jumped on Route 66 for a bit and found a really cool , very retro diner to eat at, called Goldie’s Route 66 Diner. They had great food at very reasonable prices.
Thursday evening: Check into hotel, visit Old Vegas.
Friday: relax by the pool, then visit the Vegas Strip at night. Stay 2nd night.
Saturday: Head to Cali!
Relax by the beach all week,
Trip to L.A. on Wednesday.
Fly home Saturday Oct 28.

Now it was on to the VERY FUN task of looking for places to stay!

I like to scout out unique hotels and vacation rentals, so I planned ahead on where and when we’d be stopping, then looked for places near those areas. I love renting through VRBO,Airbnb and Homeaway, so I would always check them first. Since we have 5 people, we always need 2 hotel rooms or at least a roll away bed, and that gets cramped, so we usually opt for a second room, when we can. This time, we had 7 people and 3 dogs, so we definitely needed 2 rooms. In some cases, it was cheaper or as cheap to get a rental house all to ourselves compared to hotels. I did this when I could.

For Kansas, Colorado and Grand Canyon, I found such great prices on hotel rooms, so that ended up being the better option for those nights.

I found a really awesome Cabin in Utah on Airbnb for a great price. I always LOVE staying in Cabins, and I know my parents do as well, so I was specifically searching for a nice mountain cabin to chill in after a long day of hiking Bryce. This one was PERFECT! I has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths. Sleeps 10 in beds! Nice second story deck as well as a smaller first level deck. Plenty of large windows to let the sunshine in and enjoy nature. There was a playset, fire pit and grill. Plus plenty of trails and wildlife around. When we go back to Utah, we’d love to stay here again!

For Vegas I wanted to stay in one of the casino hotels, so this one was going to be a bit of a splurge for us, where as all of the others I went for best price. We ended up letting the kids choose the hotel. I showed them a bunch of options that were within our budget and they chose The Golden Nugget which is on Fremont St. So we had the Fremont St. Experience right outside our hotel! IT WAS AMAZING!! The kids went out, but didn’t stay out there for long. They got a few laughs and decided to retreat back to the room. We escorted them up, then went back down for some fun. We got amazing street tacos, saw some awesome performances, and very much enjoyed people watching. You never know what you’ll see in Vegas!

The second night, we went to The Strip to explore. We were so sad that the Bellagio fountain wasn’t working due to high winds. It had been a beautiful day, but that night it was so windy and cold, we didn’t stay out long. (I ended up going back to Vegas the following July for my best friend’s birthday, so I was able to see a little bit more of the city, including the fountains, but still I don’t feel like I’ve been able to spend enough time there either time I’ve been, and the kids loved it and want to go back, so we hope to make it back out there again!)

After that, it was on to Cali! I reserved the entire second week’s stay through HomeAway. We stayed at the “White Water Getaway” in Oceanside. This place accomplished my goal! The kids fell in love with this condo and with California! This place is the epitome of my dream beach home! It’s a 3 bedroom, 2 bath with an amazing view of the ocean and it’s just steps away from the beach! The kitchen is very spacious and fully stocked and shares the amazing view with the living room and balcony. I loved how the entire wall leading to the balcony was sliding glass doors. We had those doors open the entire time we were there, except when we were sleeping… oh wait, I slept on the couch a few nights and left them open…sooo, yeah, they were rarely closed that week! It was Heaven on Earth!

We went grocery shopping on our first full day in California so we could stock up on snacks and buy some groceries so I could take advantage of cooking in this amazing kitchen while looking out at the ocean. If only I could have that every day! Hopefully someday!

I really had so much fun planning this trip and it was super exciting to finally be able to take the trip after six months of serious planning and looking forward to the adventure. I can’t wait to plan our next one! We are going to Lake Tahoe in July and I really would like to drive again. The kids are kinda feeling like they want to fly instead, but it all depends on what’s the cheapest way for us to go…I’d love to be able to make some more stops at some amazing places we would be passing on our drive. So we shall see what happens. We have 5 months to figure that out. And you better believe that I’ve been doing my research! 🙂 I am looking into renting and RV again, but I know it probably won’t be the cheapest way to go. Maybe we should just BUY an RV instead…. hmmmmm. (More on that later…)

Enjoy some more of our pics from the trip and
feel free to ask any questions you have on planning your own.
Also, please comment and let me know if you’ve ever taken a long road trip and where you went! I love hearing your stories!

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