Two Years in the Making

Welcome to Vacationing through the Middle States, our blog dedicated to the planning and traveling for what will be our most adventurous and extensive trip we've made in our over three decades together.

By way of introduction, I'm headed towards retirement in March 2024 while D(ear) H(usband) has been retired since 2016.  When he retired, we had one son in college and one graduating from high school, so his first few retirement years were spent in getting them through college and out on their own.  We're happy to report that it has been successful, so now that I'm ready to retire, we're truly empty-nesters and are in a position that we can just go!  (I will say here that I'm glad I didn't choose to retire during COVID because I would have been seriously disappointed at not being able to travel freely during that time.)

And now that we have a target date for when we can go, why the Middle States, and why Two Years in the Making?

Why the Middle States?  I have been to 46 of the U.S.'s 50 states; DH has 9 to go before we can say we've been to all 50 states.  I still need Iowa and Kansas (and Vermont and Delaware), and DH has several in addition to those two that are in the middle part of America.  I love Blue Bunny ice cream and their headquarters is in Le Mars, Iowa, so I had joked around that "if I ever go to Iowa, I'm going to the Blue Bunny Ice Cream Parlor" [which has now changed its name but is the same idea].  One day, DH said he would really like to go to Hot Springs National Park.  I guess I filed that away in my travel-planning brain because when we started talking about what we'd like to do to celebrate my retirement, Hot Springs became the starting point for what has become our Middle States trip.  We got the map out (ok, we loaded Google Maps on the computer screen) and started looking at how far it was to some of the other places (Blue Bunny in Iowa) that we would like to see in person as well as check off some more states.

Why Two Years in the Making?  We first started talking about really doing this trip in early 2022, and since it was all new territory for us, I knew we had a lot of research to do.  [I should say here that I'm the one who loves to do the planning and such; DH enjoys the trip itself, so most of the planning is my responsibility but for this one, we picked the main places together.]  Our initial look revealed that for some of our destinations, they have such seasonal schedules that we needed to have an idea of where we were going early so we could see what their 2023 schedules are so we could make educated guesses about what 2024 would be.  We also have been tweaking our planned route as we've learned more about the area(s) from friends, online sources, or meeting people from the places on our itinerary.

So we're about 11 months away from departure. I want to document this trip, not just when we go on it, but also the planning and preparation process in case it's of interest or helpful to someone else.  I enjoy reading about others' traveling and pick up useful tips and information; I hope we can return the favor through this blog.

~ Cindy D