Planning the Great Adventure

Saturday, June 11, 1994

In the summer of 1993 I came up with the idea of taking a trip to visit my Kretzer relatives back in Kentucky. My two favorite Aunts, Dad’s sisters, had come out to visit a few years before and I felt like I owed them a visit. This quickly escalated into a cross country road trip. The adventurers in this trip consisted of me, wife Margo, daughters; Jolene and Jessi, my Mom, my brother; Jayme, and his son, Brandon. Our ultimate destination was to be Ashland, KY. That is where my Dad grew up and it was well past time that we went to visit. Dad, unfortunately, was not going. He hates to travel and no amount of persuasion, including having a brother (my Uncle Jimmy) not doing so well, could convince him to go.

Planning for a road trip in 1993 was very different than it is now, fifteen years later. Personal Computers were around, by far from having one or more per house. The World Wide Web was in its infancy. There was no Google, no Yahoo, no Expedia.com and TravBuddy was thirteen years from it’s debut. There were virtually no places, hotels, cities, attractions, ect with their own websites. No MapQuest. No GoogleEarth. There wasn’t even iPods to pass the time.

Margo and I did the planning with the tools of the day. We got a brand new Rand McNally Atlas and began. We started with the premise that we were not going to just drive and drive and drive some more. There was no way we were going to miss this opportunity to see some of America and to expose our girls to some of America’s greatest treasures. That meant that we would plan to drive no more than six hours each day, getting an early start, and then stopping to experience something each day. With that established we next made a list of things between hear and Ashland, KY that we wanted to see or do. I had the most input there, as Margo, Mom and Jayme said they were fine with whatever I came up with. In the end we decided to make stops in Colorado Springs, CO, Canon City, CO, La Junta, CO, Dodge City, KS, Kansas City, MO, and St Louis, MO on the way to Branson. On the way back it would be Nashville, TN, Memphis, TN, Branson, MO, Coffeyville, KS, Wayside, KS, and a hotel only stop in Salida, KS on our way home. The cities were chosen both because their distance between each other allowed us to meet our driving goals and because they had something that interested us in them.

We had scoured the atlas looking for tiny little red squares that listed an attraction in a major city or on the general route. Most of these were thrown out, but a few of them were added in as stops to help break up the day. For each and every city we planned to stop in Margo wrote a letter to the Chamber of Commerce asking for information. We got answers from all of them. Most had flyers for attractions nearby and hotels. Those came in very handy in planning our trip.

Estimates in drive time were created and guesses of how long we would likely want to spend at each attraction were made. All of that was factored in and in something short of a year, we had all of the details ironed. We had a driving route planned, hotel reservations made (courtesy of the toll free numbers from either the brochures or from a chain cataloge), specific directions to each stop and most importantly a budget with wiggle room, and the money to cover it.

The trip was going to take us 13 days and promised to be one hell of a ride!