I've been promising to post about our upcoming road trip and subsequent plans for a while. Now that it is about a week until we leave Austin, I figure I should send out an update to let everybody know what's going on.
The plan is to leave Austin by september 7 at the latest. By that time we will have sold everything we can, through either gbay or a garage sale, packed up and stored the stuff we eventually want to ship to New Zealand, and packed the Insight with a small amount of stuff for the road trip. The house will sell sometime (soon, we hope).
Our itinerary is roughly:
- Dallas, TX
- Tulsa, OK
- Eureka, KS
- Denver, CO
- Zion/Bryce Canyon National Parks, UT
- Las Vegas, NV
- Prescott, AZ
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Diego, CA
- Los Angeles, CA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Yosemite National Park, CA
- San Francisco, CA
- Eureka, CA
- Portland, OR
- Mount Saint Helens, WA
- Seattle, WA
- Vancouver, BC
- Victoria, BC
We expect this to take just over two months and be about 5000 miles distance. We'll be camping and/or couchsurfing and/or staying in hotels. If you're on or anywhere roughly close to that route, let us know (some of the destinations above are already on the list to meet specific people). We'd love to stop by and say hi.
As mentioned, we're taking the Insight which should get a good solid 60 miles per gallon on the freeway. If the gas prices go up in Katrina's wake, the interstate freeways might be pretty empty. But, that's not a bad thing for us. Last week our predicted fuel budget was only about $300 so it won't matter too much even if it doubles.
Once we reach Canada, we're going to hang out at my parents' place in Victoria until my New Zealand paperwork is complete. Our current estimate for that is around december. When that is all approved, we will head to New Zealand to enjoy the rest of the summer there!
When we reach New Zealand, we will travel around the country for a couple of months and figure out where we want to live. Currently, Wellington and Christchurch are high on the list but we don't really know for sure yet.
I'm really excited about this trip and I'm glad I get to enjoy it with Amy. I'll miss everybody in Austin, but there are some things I won't miss very much (the heat, the traffic, the sprawl). The internet makes the world smaller, so nobody is ever more than an email away.