Flashback to 3 years ago

One week from today, we will be heading to Livermore, CA for the summer.  Neither of us have been anywhere in California other than San Diego, so it should be a great time!

Since we have a dog and need to have a car in Livermore, we are driving across the country...again. Here the route that we plan to take:



If you look back on our original cross country road trip, we wasted a lot of time. We got a 2 hour later start than planned, meandered around Knoxville during lunch, and then took ourselves on a walking tour of Vanderbilt. Since we now have a few cross country trips under our belt and don't have much we haven't seen before or want to see until we hit California, I think our first couple of days this time around will be much more efficient.

The first night, we plan to make it to Fort Smith, AR, which is right near the Oklahoma border. We may go crazy driving through all of Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle, and almost all of New Mexico the next day.  Each of these days is a little over 12 hours, but I'm sure will take us a bit longer with stops.

Gallup, NM is up next, and then we will drive to Santa Barbara and spend the night. This will be a shorter day and we plan to skip Los Angeles and go above it, through Palmdale, CA. We plan to have a mini vacation in central California and stay one night in Santa Barbara and one night in San Luis Obispo.

From San Luis Obispo, it's just about 3 hours to Livermore. If you have any recommendations for things to see along our route, or good podcasts to listen to, let me know!