It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this is a rough idea only.  One thing, however, that we were surprised to find when we started talking potential routes was that a year isn’t enough.  That sounds ludicrous, but the more you start thinking about where you want to be at what time of year, and chasing mild weather is a must for us, the more you realize that only certain routes make sense.  Nothing south or southeast in the Summer, nothing central or north in the Winter, and anywhere but the mountains in the Spring and Fall, though there are exceptions to that mountain part.  Tacco started talking early smack about “that settles it then, we’ll do this for 2 years!” but my head imploded.

So we’re assuming one year.  I’ve discussed in another post that this time frame is also a wag at best, as we still have a house on the market and are clueless in general.  Another assumption is that we’ll end up in the Pacific Northwest — that assumption is far from solid as well.

Now that my disclaimers are out of the way, here’s a drawing of our rough thinking on the flow of things that looks like a second grader did it:

We unfortunately had to cut New England from the flow as we started later than we had originally planned.  We do have some anchor points, however, due to significant events and having made some advance reservations.  We’ll be in Grand Targhee, WY (hopefully at the top of the Tetons) for the solar eclipse on August 21st, and Yellowstone thereafter.  We’ll then head generally west to the coast and down.  We plan to stay in my parents’ driveway in the SF Bay area in mid-to-late-September, will do a 3 day mega-tailgate (seriously) at Stanford for the ASU football game on the 30th, and will continue down the coast throughout October, ending up in Coronado.  Then we’ll turn back to the east and make our way toward the Gulf Coast, ending up in south Florida by the end of December or January.  Ideally, we’ll then park Davista at a military base somewhere in Florida for 2 months or so and head to Europe, where we’ll do a month in southern Europe (we’re thinking Spain, Italy, Greece… lotta wiggle room here), then up to somewhere in the Alps for a month of skiing, snowboarding, and being Alpine.  Back to Florida and up the Atlantic side into the Deep South for the Spring, and then back across toward the Southwest for the late Spring.  Back into the Rockies by June (Telluride Bluegrass Festival anyone?) and mess around in the mountains until mid-July, at which point we head back to the Pacific Northwest.

Though we’re intending to stay a few days behind on the blog, location-wise, part of the considerable appeal of this trip is visiting friends and family as we’re making our way around the country.  Please shoot us a message (here on the blog, Facebook if you’re there, phone, wherever) if you think we’re nearby and feel so inclined.  We won’t be able to visit a quarter of the people we’d like to due to the standard limitations (and some unique ones brought on by my having to keep going to work throughout this journey), but we desperately want to try.

March, 2018 Update:  Here’s what we’ve done so far and what we’re planning for the next, and final, few months.