New York to California
 

Three Women
One Mission: Discover the USA
After several drinks of wine, many bites of pasta, life philophy musings and random dance party together, we have decided that a road trip is the cure.

July 2010
2 weeks away from work
Starting in the big apple (NYC includes 5 boroughs), ending in sunny California

We would like to visit these places:
Mount Rushmore
Yellowstone National Park
Niagara Falls
Yosemite
Dollywood
Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum
Route 66
Worlds Fair site in Chicago

We need your help!
Your Mission, if you choose to accept it, is to help us plan this adventure.
Please give us suggestions of where to go and routes to take.

Women Out.

I did a West Coast to NYC round trip road trip last summer; click on my name to read the trip report. Besides NYC, I visited several other places on your list: Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, Niagara Falls, and Chicago. Other interesting places along our route included Mackinac Island, MI, and the Lancaster PA area (Amish Country). It took us 3+ weeks, but two weeks would be sufficient if you're only doing the drive in one direction.

If you are an Auto Club member, they have a terrific service called Trip Tic where they will route your trip going through whatever places you like and provide the maps with interesting factoids. You can also access it online to plan and print yourself. We planned 4 different trips when we went cross country and still ended up altering our final route as we drove. Have a great time!

Wow, that's a convoluted route!

Do you really intend to zig-zag across the country? Have you plotted out where all those places are? I'm just asking, as these destinations don't really line up with one another.

For example, Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone are not really compatible with Route 66, unless all you plan to do of 66 is the parts in Illinois and Missouri.

And whereas NYC/Niagara Falls/Chicago/Mount Rushmore/Yellowstone more or less line up with one another, Dollywood and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum are on a different latitude (which means you will either do some zig-zagging, as mentioned before, or you will have to backtrack for part of your route, since Chicago is between them going east-to-west).

Maybe you know all that and it is not a concern - just seems you might be setting yourselves up for a lot of extra driving.

An awful lot to cover in 2 weeks considering how much north and south you will have to do as well as east to west. Assuming you take turns driving and don;t mind spending a LOT fo time in the car it's doable -but you will have little time for sightseeing (and I assume you're flying back - or all bets are off).

(If you have a quick look at a map route you will see this trip is more than 5000 miles in length (average of 350 miles per day - not including any sightseeing) and well over 80 hours of driving time. If there are 8 days of seeing something (not forward progress driving) - your average mileage is more than 800 miles a day.

Also, be sure you have you passport to get into Canada - where most of the good stuff at Niagara Falls is.

I generally love road trips - but IMHO this is too much territory in too little time to see much.