Thanks to 2020’s endless barrage of bad news and terrible events, we’ve had to modify our plans for our cross-country road trip. This isn’t actually that much of a surprise – we’d figured that something might come up and planned for alternatives.
With the forest fires raging across the West coast of the US (and the poor air quality that such fires produce), we had to change our plans. After studying the extent of the fires and monitoring air quality maps, we decided we’d still go as far as Colorado, but not any further (with the possible exception of a quick jaunt over the border to Utah for Arches National Park).
So, I’m still going to get to see my mountains – and to drive my car over the continental divide (something that excites me in the way that only nerdy things can), but we won’t make it to California or to see the giant Redwoods. With all the smoke and haze from the fires, we probably wouldn’t have a very nice view anyway – to say nothing of the fact that both my wife and I are sensitive to poor air quality.
On the plus side, our revised itinerary takes us around the state of Colorado, which means shorter driving times between destinations. We’ll also be able to take it a little bit easier, since our destinations are closer together (within 1 state rather than across multiple). We’ll also be able to take in a bit more of the scenery – including a couple of scenic byways that we’re planning to take, which wouldn’t have been feasible with our previous itinerary since we were mainly driving to get to our next stop as quickly as possible.
We’ll still have a long 3 days of driving just to get out west (and again when we go home), but we’ll be taking turns driving so it won’t be too bad. It’s also possible we may end up finishing our trip slightly early, which means we could again take a more relaxed route home.
That said, everything else is still good for our trip – the buns have their sitter, we’ve packed most of our stuff, and my car is ready to go.
I don’t know how much downtime I’ll have each day back in the camper to update this blog, but I will be taking my camera (of course) and will try to post updates on the trip if I can – if not here, then at least on my Twitter, and then I’ll do a wrap-up post when we get back.
We’re still ready to change plans again in case anything else happens, or if conditions change along the way, but fingers crossed that we’ll be able to get where we want to go and see what we want to see.
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