Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Arkansas — get ready, here we come.?? We have been planning and budgeting for this trip for over a year now.? This is one of our “bucket list” dreams is to finish visiting all 50 of these Blessed United States.?? After this trip we still lack Maine, and Connecticut.? However, this marks off a lot of the remaining states for us.?? I can’t wait.

We have planned 3 weeks +/- of vacation time for me.? My wife gets every summer off from the school system so she won’t have to burn any of her vacation time.? We are leaving after I work a full day to get a head start on the first leg of our drive.?? We hope to get to Mt. Vernon Illinois the first night, then wake up early to drive another 12 hours the next day to get to Mt. Rushmore.? Our 2 night stay should be enough to see the monument and take several photos and then head on to the lengthiest stay of our journey which will be Yellowstone National Park.

We hope to see a lot of Yellowstone, but realize that the size of the park is just too large to see everything.?? Norma has planned for us to see the highlights at least.? Starting with Old Faithful,? Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, Heyden Valley, Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone Lake, North Geyser Basin, Lamar Valley, Tower Falls, Lower Geyser Basin, West Thumb Geyser Basin, and all the wildlife that we can photograph with a zoom lens.? You won’t hear about me on the news being trampled by a buffalo, or mauled by a bear.

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We will be using a combination of dry docking, or boondocking, and paid for locations at each park.? We plan to see Mount Rushmore first as we rotate counter clockwise through the country.? We have friends that have given us advise on what to see and how to navigate around the hills area.? I will post later where we stay at each stop and how it measured up to our standards.? We have everything booked, reserved and first night paid for at each stop.

Then we move on to Yellowstone National park and invest the largest single amount of time of our 3+ week tour.? We plan to stay 5 nights and 4 days to see as much as we can.?? I have promised my co-workers that I will call them while standing in front of the live web-cam at “Old Faithful”? and wave so they can see that I haven’t been just making this up :-).? Check out the live streaming web cam here.

Then we move on to Mt St Helens in WA state.? This will be another 2 day drive from Yellowstone to Mt St Helens, and we will dry dock again one night to get us by until we get there.?? Another webcam is available here but it is not a live streaming video feed, just a static image that refreshes every few minutes.? Still a nice view.

More to come……