Remember, Murphy and that best laid plans thing? Well he has struck even before we leave. I just discovered today that the first campground we intended to stay at is located across the highway from the Iowa Speedway and they have a race there on August 3. Guess what? They have no room for a tent!! So we will have to drive another hour on the first day to get a tent site or a hotel room if it is raining.
On to the post cruise itinerary:
We arrive back in Seattle early in the morning of August 24th. Because our car will be parked across the street from the port, we will walk off early with our luggage. This will give us the whole day to explore Seattle, if we didn't have time before the cruise, or be well on our way to Portland, our first stop after the cruise.
There are a couple of restaurants named Otto's in Portland and we want to discover them. We also plan to visit an acquaintance near here for coffee and do some outlet shopping since Oregon, like Alaska, has no retail sales tax.
We will head out to the coast highway at Newport, OR and travel down the coast, hopefully to Eureka, California. From here we will head inland and catch up with Highway 99, another decommissioned "main" road through the centre of California. At Bakersfield, we will head east to Barstow and get on Route 66 to Kingman, AR. This will allow us to complete much of the still drivable section of Route 66. We have had two other trips following the mother road.
From Kingman we plan to travel north to Vegas and try our luck at one of the casinos. Then it is on to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, Bryce, Scenic Highway 12 in Utah (and a couple of more National Parks) before getting back on Interstate 70 to Denver.
We hope to be able to tour Denver since it got short changed on our 1992 trip. We spent an entire day at a Ford dealership having the air conditioning fixed on a relatively new (6 months old) Aerostar. This time we would like to see the city.
From Denver we will head home and have only one more stop planned in the Amana Communities in Iowa. We have bypassed them on a couple of trips and I would finally like to tour them. Yes, this is where the Amana refrigerators were originally built. The colonies were settled by Germans who were being persecuted at home for their religion.
It looks so simple on paper but will take us 2 to 3 weeks to complete. We hope for good weather and we hope not to run into any forest fires that will take us off our planned route. But like I said, the best laid plans............!
Next: the ship
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