Our Ultimate Family Vacation

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Cheerios® is giving you the chance to win a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, your ultimate family vacation. As part of a paid promotion for their “Do What You Love” Sweepstakes, Cheerios® is sponsoring my post today about what my ultimate family vacation would be. Read mine, Enter the Sweepstakes for a chance to actually win your own fantasy family trip or one of a bunch of other great prizes.

As newlyweds, we have had a few conversations on what vacations we want to save up for and take in the future. A big contender is checking out the lush hillsides of Ireland. Every time something Irish comes up, one of us makes the comment of how badly we want to go.

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However I think one of the coolest trips we could take would be the Ultimate All-American Road Trip I have been planning for the last 6 years. Yes, I have seriously dreamed of this trip for SIX years. So what's the plan?

Well initially my plan started as a road trip across the entire 50 states and as cool as that sounded it felt a little ambitious. So instead I have narrowed the journey down to a Historic Route 66 Road Trip from Chicago to LA. The basic logistics would involve one way flights from here to Chicago and from LA back to here. Therefore we would use a rental car to take the journey. Since we have a few years before we are old enough to rent a car this gives us time to save for this trip :)

My ultimate goal would be to create an Elizabethtown style map/scrapbook of our journey along the way.

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I think the best way to accomplish this is to start out with a blank binder with tons of page protectors and blank sheets, markers and pens, scissors, double-sided tape, and my camera (along with it's usb cable). Then all along the way we pick up flyers and brochures and menus and business cards and take tons of photos and include all these with journaling about each moment. Every couple days also stop at a drug store photo kiosk or a fedex kinko's and print out our favorite photos to include in the appropriate spots. This way we will make a map of our journey and all the little things we hope to remember for the years to come.

In advance of course, I want to plot some of our stops and include these in the journal. Some great resources I've found for planning for this ultimate trip are: Roadside America, The American Roadside, The Quirky American West, Top 50 American Roadside Attractions, and Road Trip USA Route 66. These have given me a great list of cheesy and intriguing roadside stops that will be so fun to explore and the Road Trip USA Route 66 provides a wonderful map of all the towns we will pass along the way. 

Of course we will allow for digressions off of Route 66 such as the hour detour to check out Metropolis, IL - hometown to none other than Superman. Other big contenders include tagging the cars at Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo, TX, grabbing a burger at Oldest Bob's Big Boy in Burbank, CA, walking across the original London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, AZ, having a picnic with The Blue Whale in Catoosa, OK, and how great would it be to schedule the trip in time for New Mexico's annual International Balloon Festival!

Wouldn't this make for such a memorable vacation for our family of two? :)

Don't forget to enter the “Do What You Love” Sweepstakes, for a chance to win your own ultimate family vacation. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.