Susan, Pam and I are eagerly awaiting our upcoming trip.  The plan is to pick up the rental van on Friday July 1st from Charlotte.   My will go with us for this portion.  We will drive granddad’s route back to Rutherford college and then head to Lenoir for the night.  We start the official trip Saturday morning.  We decided to rent a van for the month for many reasons.  It gives us flexibility in case we have car trouble, it allows for emergency stop the trip but mostly it gives us more room.     We have a tentative location stop for the different days but we are still fine tuning it.  We want to be flexible in case we want to stay longer in an area so we will only be making hotel reservations 1 day in advance.  It will be more of a challenge with using points but we are all up for a challenge.   Our first stop is planned for Sparta, TN.  This is one of the cities granddad stayed in on his trip.

There are Marriott, Hilton and Holiday Inn properties there.   I’ll probably choose the Marriott property since I have tons of Marriott and Hilton points but Hilton properties seem to be more popular on the route.  I also have Hyatt and Starwood points but those are only available in larger cities so I won’t get to use them as often.

I’m still hoping we can make it thru the trip on all my points.  Follow this link for our tentative route and time line.   I have the cities we are going thru.  Red Bold are cities granddad stayed in, Black Bold are cities granddad talked about in the journal and the other cities are ones we will have to put in our GPS fo force us on the correct higways.   Our day totals are on the blue lines and include the mileage for the day and the time (google map time) for our route.  We have some long days.   I also have the highways… we are taking.  This just gives you a better idea of our tentative_route and time line

I hope you enjoy following us on our adventures.