See America 2008

As the chief planner and architect of this trip, I also suffer some gnawing regrets for plans that fell through and for some under planning, in hindsight. You have to weigh the drive to plan each day against the ability to "go with the flow". As a consequence, some important details get overlooked and other minor details turn out to be major. As adults, Cathy and I can deal with such hiccups in the plan, and as it turned out, Kimberly and Jake were also able to roll with shifting itineraries and time constraints better than we would have given them credit for prior to the trip.

Chief avoidable disappointment - missing the Dave Neihaus induction, in fact, missing the entire induction ceremony at the Hall of Fame. We could not find out until we got to Cooperstown that the ceremony didn't start until 1:30pm. We had hoped for some interaction with the inductees during the morning that day. Didn't happen. We could only spend until noon at the Hall of Fame, before continuing on to Palmyra, Buffalo, and Niagara Falls to get in at a reasonable hour. As it was, we had to do the whirlwind tour of Palmyra, Hill Cumorah, and the Sacred Grove, and didn't get back on the road to Buffalo until 6pm. We did not make it to Buffalo until 8:30, where we stopped for a quick dinner, then continued to our hotel in Niagara Falls, arriving a 9:45 that night.

Next disappointment: No trip up the Gateway Arch. I could have purchased advanced tickets online for a specific time, but didn't want to risk missing our time due to travel problems. As it turned out, the Cardinals were in town that Friday and the game with the Cubs brought hoards of visitors to downtown St. Louis, including the Arch - just a block from Busch Stadium. The wait would have added another hour and a half, plus the time spent up in the Arch. We still needed to make it to Evansville, Indiana, for the night, to keep the rest of the trip on schedule. Bummer.

The third is a tie between missing out on Mammoth Cave National Park and missing out on Fenway Park. Again, had I purchased advance tickets online for the cave tours at Mammoth Cave, we could have added that to the very long day going from Evansville to Charleston, WV, but by the time I looked for tickets, all the tours were sold out. I feel bad about Fenway, because we were so close, but it was a Red Sox - Yankees weekend and was sold out all year. Also, we might have been able to do the Fenway tour, but never made the attempt.

The kids might add that we should have planned for more time to deal with huge crowds at Cedar Point. We had to miss riding the Millennium Force, perhaps the greatest roller coaster in the world. We only got 5 total rides in 6 hours. More time would have afforded us the "luxury" of spending 1.5-2 hours in some lines. Here's a hint, Cedar Point, ever hear of FastPass???

Lesson learned: The best laid plans will always overlook seemingly minor details that come back to bite you. Also, you can't plan for disruption to the plan, but you can be prepared to roll with it and take it in stride.

Labels: induction ceremony, Niehaus, trip planning

Well I've finally accounted for 99% of our trip costs. There are still some minor things like luggage tips and other odd cash transactions that I don't have receipts for or just plain can't remember. The table below lays it out by category:

Expense	Amount
Car Rental	811.76
Train	756.00
Dinners	639.25
Gas	595.28
Lunches	406.94
Fees	393.85
Souvenirs	298.00
Breakfasts	249.49
Parking	127.00
Walmart (groceries, sundries)	103.33
Refreshments (drinks, snacks)	89.79
Hotel (One night wasn't covered)	89.15
Mass Transit	80.00
Added Fees (inside attractions)	62.50
Cabs	45.00
Wireless (hotspots, hotels)	33.85
Highway Tolls	20.00
Total	4801.19

So it works out to about $1200/person, $320/day, and $1.60 per mile driven. The gas cost/mile driven was 19.8 cents/mile. Yeah it cost way more than I thought going in. We were shocked at the food prices we were seeing in the restaurants, but were firm in sticking to our pledge of "no national chains" and keeping a "when in Rome" attitude. When I mentioned in an earlier post that I expected it to cost $2000-$2500, I had mentally already factored in the car rental and the train tickets. If you take those out, the actual total for the things I was counting in my original estimate equates to about $3300 - still way over my estimate.

Lesson learned: Plan on budgeting double what you think this kind of trip might cost - then be pleasantly surprised if it costs less. We are in good enough shape financially that we could expense this trip without carrying a credit card balance, but we did tap some savings to do it. Dave Ramsey would probably argue that if you had to use cash for all these transactions, and not credit cards, you almost for sure would spend less. The ease of a credit card makes you spend more than you think you are spending.

Labels: cross country drive budget, delta sky miles, how we did it, travel rewards, trip planning

After polling the family and seeking their rankings in isolation from each other, the ratings below emerged.

Rank	Jacob (11)	Kimberly (14)	Cathy (43)	Dave (44)
1	Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY [The actual Hall of Plaques]	Water Country USA	LDS Church History Sites [Sharon VT, Palmyra NY, Kirtland OH, Nauvoo IL, Carthage IL]	Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY [The Museum]
2	Water Country USA	Cedar Point	Rural Drives [NH, VT, Upstate NY, IL, WV, VA]	Boston [Freedom Trail and the baseball vibe]
3	Cedar Point [Mean Streak]	Boston [USS Constitution]	Boston [Freedom Trail; Red Sox/Yankees weekend atmosphere]	Washington DC [Arlington Cemetery, Korean War Memorial]
4	Washington DC [Monuments and Tomb of the Unknowns]	Nauvoo, IL	Washington DC [Lincoln Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, Korean War Memorial, Smithsonian]	Sharon, Vermont [Solitude and the sense of history; beautiful Green Mountains]
5	Boston [USS Constitution]	St. Louis	Appomattox National Historical Park [Living history ranger talk]	The smell of corn growing – thick in the air in Dubuque, Iowa
6	Niagara Falls	Washington DC [Monuments and Mall]	Chicago [Sears Tower, colorful cabbie, walk through downtown]	Water Country USA
7	Field of Dreams, Dyersville, IA	Washington DC [Tomb of the Unknowns]	Baseball Hall of Fame [Museum, Buck O’Neil, Tribute to great fans, no-hitter balls, Abbot and Costello Who’s on First	Chicago [The urban experience]
8	Sears Tower, Chicago	Niagara Falls	Niagara Falls	The Acela Express DC-Boston run on AMTRAK
9	Nauvoo, IL [Hitting a home run in stick ball game]	Field of Dreams, Dyersville, IA	St. Louis [Gateway Arch]	Field of Dreams movie site
10	St. Louis [Ted Drewes Frozen Custard on Route 66]	Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY	Field of Dreams movie location	Nauvoo, IL [The Nauvoo Pageant]

Time to start reflecting on the trip, the pros, the cons, the costs, and the benefits. Using the Delta Website, I looked up what 4 nonrefundable, coach class, tickets would cost for a flight from Pasco, WA, to Reagan National - leaving on a Tuesday and returning on a Tuesday two weeks later. The quote I got was $5884 or $1471 per person. Of course that reflects much inflation since we booked our SkySaver tickets in October last year. Our flights cost us 75,000 miles from Delta and 20,000 miles from Alaska, which translated to $40 in fees to book using miles. Even if the tickets had been $1000 apiece last October we still paid for the trip with the miles alone.

We also saved $2440 on lodging. That's what the reward nights amounted to in avoided room charges, excluding room and sales taxes, which could easily add another 10-15% to that total - as those charges are also avoided when redeeming reward nights. Granted, if we had to pay for our own hotel rooms, there would have been more budget choices selected. However, there are no real budget choices for hotels convenient to DC, Boston, or Chicago. So, the savings were calculated as though we would have stayed in the same properties and paid the AAA rate.

So, the flights and lodging savings amount to $8324 - the amount we would have had to spend to take the same flights and stay in the same hotels paying market rates. The next post will discuss the detailed costs we actually did incur. Rough figuring in my head, we spent $2000-$2500, but I need to pile up the receipts and do some math. Stay tuned.

Labels: cross country drive budget, delta sky miles, how we did it, travel rewards, trip planning

We got out to the mall by about 10:30 and hiked to the Lincoln Memorial, Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the Vietnam Wall. We passed the Washington Monument and the WW II Memorial on the way, but didn't take time to stop at those monuments. At the Lincoln Memorial we took time to read the Gettysburg Address and his Inaugural Address from his re-election in 1864.

Sad to say this was my first visit to Korean War monument since it was built. It was the most impactful for me - and not just because my Dad is a veteran of that war. The soldier statues truly appear haunting and life-like. Of the war monuments, this one does the most to allow visitors to imagine what things might have been like.

Hot, hungry and thirsty, we snagged a cab to the Natural History Museum in search of cool air and refreshments. The Atrium Cafe there provided both in abundance, and we ate our last meal of the road trip there. We were able to spend only about an hour and a half touring the museum after lunch before we needed to get back to check out of the hotel and head to the airport.

I highly recommend the Crystal Gateway Marriott for its convenient location to the Crystal City Metro stop. It has a connecting tunnel to the Crystal City Shops and the Metro, and is just one stop from Reagan National Airport.

The trip home was uneventful - the favorite adjective of frequent travelers. No glitches, despite the Hurricane Eduard impacting the Texas airports. We got home about 10pm Tuesday night and crashed into bed.

Future posts will break down the trip and provide some reflection for those considering a similar trip. We covered 3010 miles in our rented minivan, over 10 days of driving. We found that to be just about right, and our days were full for sure. Any more driving and the overall experience for all would have been diminished proportionally. As it turned out, all seem to have thought the trip was great and would change little. We will explore this more in future posts.

Yes, we are aware that we could easily spend a week or more in the Williamsburg area seeing historical sites and amusement parks. However, our initial planning for this trip, we decided to focus only on Water Country USA. We were not disappointed. The park was packed on a Monday, but the weather was perfect - not too humid. I'm sure all would agree that the Hubba Hubba Highway (AKA a lazy river) was our favorite "ride."

We spent the whole day there, then headed for Washington around 6pm. We managed to pick up some Popeye's Chicken that we ate in the van on the way. We had the goal to turn in the van at National Airport by 9pm, and we just made it. We are staying at the Marriott Crystal Gateway in Crystal City, a very nice conference hotel right next to the airport and the Metro.

Plan for tomorrow: The goal is to visit the rest of the monuments on the Mall that we didn't have time to see at the start of the trip. We also hope to see the Museum of Natural History. Our flight is not until 5:25, so we should have time. The other goal is to get home without any glitches in the air travel. Hopefully, tomorrow's entry will come from Richland.

Even if I had remembered to adjust the time zone on my cell phone alarm, and we had jumped into action at 6am EDT, we would not have had enough time to fit Jamestown into the schedule. As it turned out, I jumped up, out of alarm, realizing that my cell phone still thought it was central time - so our hopes of getting out of Charleston by 7:30 were dashed. We didn't get in to Williamsburg until 8pm, anyway.






First, we wound our way out from Charleston up the Kanawha River and the New River, its tributary. We visited the New River Gorge National River at the Canyon Rim Visitor Center. The overlooks at this site provide great views of the New River Gorge Bridge, the longest arch span and the highest vehicular bridge in the Western Hemisphere - an engineer's mecca. The views up the canyon also were quite impressive.

From New River, we crossed some more Appalachian "mountain country", which to this westerner seemed like touring rolling hills and broken woods, but beautiful none the less. I was impressed, as we approached the Virginia state line, of just how pristine the landscape looks today, given the history of resource exploitation all over the East. Hard to tell driving it today.

We next visited the Appomattox Courthouse National Historic Park. We learned much about the last week of the Civil War, and I found myself disgusted with my lack of knowledge. I know more about WW II than about the Civil War, and that seems wrong to me - something to work on. I never realized that the actual surrender took place in a residence near the Courthouse, rather than in the Courthouse itself. We also watched a living history presentation portraying a corporal in the Union Army and his recollections of the war, as he would have recalled it in the months immediately following the surrender. The Ranger in period costume did an outstanding job of distilling his view of the war from start to finish in about a 40-minute talk.

From Appomattox we made for Williamsburg, ignoring earlier plans to visit Jamestown, as it was 4:30pm and we still had 2+ hours of driving ahead and all were hungry. We ate BBQ in Powhatan, VA, at Perrin's BBQ. It was very good que, as they say. Stick with the "Original" sauce if you go there. We are staying at the Williamsburg Marriott, a very nice conference hotel.

Plan for tomorrow: Three words - Water Country USA. Then back to DC for our last day.

Pics Updated.

Today was spent on I-64. We opted to cruise over to Charleston, WV, where we arrived about 6pm with the loss of an hour from Central to Eastern time. We saw lots of pretty country through southern Indiana, northern Kentucky, and western West Virginia.

The only experience of note was our interesting search for gas in sparsely populated SE Indiana. The gas warning light came on near Sulphur, Indiana. So, though the options appeared sketchy at best, we stopped for gas here - where they still use the mechanical/analog pumps and the price is $4.56/gal. Click on the picture to read the pump instructions.

We had lunch at Shoneys in Frankfort, KY, a southern food buffet chain. Jake tried Catfish for the first time and loved it. In Charleston, we had dinner at Farm Table Family Restaurant. I ordered liver and onions and had Jake try the liver. He loved it. His tastes seem to be evolving beyond foods like hot dogs and toast, and he may actually trust his Dad's choices when it comes to food.

Plan for tomorrow: Tomorrow will be the longest travel day of the trip. We plan to see the New River Gorge National River, the Appomattox Courthouse National Historic Park, the Colonial National Historic Park (Jamestown), and Williamsburg.

Pic gallery has been updated.

Today we began our trip back to the east after reaching the apogee of the journey west. We first visited the Carthage Jail in Carthage, IL, and took the full tour.

From there, we headed for St. Louis. We had lunch in the boyhood home of Mark Twain, Hanibal, MO. Nothing special, just a Chinese buffet with an opportune location given restroom needs at the time.

We made good time getting to St. Louis around 3pm. We came here with the goal of going to the top of the Gateway Arch, but quickly realized that we should have made advanced reservations. The combination of a summer Friday and a Cardinals home game night made the wait time over and hour and a half to go up the Arch. Knowing we still had 180 miles of road to cover, we passed on the wait, but toured the Museum of Westward Expansion instead. After, taking lots of photos from the grounds of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, we made a short side trip to Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, featured on the first "Feasting on Asphalt" miniseries on the Food Network. From there, we crossed southern Illinois and southern Indiana to Evansville. We had a late dinner at Mangiamo's Italian Grill, next to the hotel. The food was very good. We are staying at the Fairfield Inn Evansville East.

Plan for tomorrow: Right now we are leaning toward making a variance tot he original plan. I had planned for us to go to Mammoth Cave National Park, but again failed to make advance reservations for the possible cave tours. Therefore, we would be aced out of seeing the Cave, making a trip to the Park a long side trip with not much pay-off. So, we are looking to make an uneventful 360 mile drive to Charleston, WV. In the morning we will look at some options for side trips along this route.

That goes for the Field of Dreams and for Nauvoo. We spent about an hour this morning at the Field of Dreams movie site in Iowa. The weather was sunny, hot, and as humid as we have experienced. Jake pitched from the mound. Cathy and I played catch with Jake in the outfield. Kimberly and Jake reprized some key scenes from the movie. We bought some souvenirs.






We can check that off of life's list. Applause to the farmers who own the property for keeping it open, free, and noncommercial.



From there we angled our way south to Nauvoo, IL. We ate lunch at the Grampa John's cafe, where they serve a "luncheon", which is basically a cafeteria-style line of entrees and sides. I went through the line being highly skeptical, but was pleasantly surprised at how good each dish was. The fried chicken was excellent, as was the cole slaw.


We toured around the restored town site and the visitor center. In the visitor center we ran into our neighbors 3 doors down, the Van katwjck's, from Richland. Our first "small world" sighting of the trip. We visited the Brigham Young home and the John Taylor home. We also saw the restored Times and Seasons publishing office. The main event, however, was the Nauvoo Pageant. This is an outdoor stage production depicting what life was like during the building of Nauvoo, and the early prosperity of the LDS Church. I think we all found it outstanding and well worth sitting in the muggy and buggy environment.















We had dinner at the Nauvoo Mill & Bakery, a nice little sandwich shop on Mulholland. Of note, they offer "Maid Rite" sandwiches - a hybrid of the hamburger and the sloppy joe. Prior to the pageant, the kids engaged in some of the pioneer games in the period fair provided. Kimberly took tot he tug of war, and Jake was humbled somewhat by a game of stick ball. We stayed in the Hampton Inn in Keokuk - very nice for the bargain amount of points covering our stay.















Plan for tomorrow: We will visit the Carthage Jail, where Joseph Smith was martyred. Then its on to St. Louis to see the Gateway Arch, and have a Concrete at Ted Drewes Frozen Custard. We will stay the night in Evansville, Indiana.