How much work went in to making our plans?

How much work went in to making our plans?  Well.. it took a lot of time, but some of it was definitely "fun" and not "work".  Here are the steps we took.... (this reminds me of an eHow how to do list which are usually  totally useless - anyway I am writing this to tell you what we did, certainly not what you should do because everyone vacations in their own way).

1.  First we looked at our wish list of what to do.  What is the ideal optimal route to take - all the things we want to see, how long we wanted to travel, which direction (east-west or west-east).  We decided we wanted to start from the Northwest.  We kind of wanted to avoid the Midwest (sorry) and we had both been to Chicago so no need to go there.  We were also interested in Texas and Colorado.  The rest we slowly filled in.  The biggest question was whether to go through St. Louis but in the end we decided to go through Memphis instead.

2. Then we researched the flight and car prices.  Flights were easy.  One way to Seattle from New York.  But car prices were hard.  Most places want to charge you crazy amounts of money to drop off in a different place from where you pick up.  And actually, it's usually the cheap places - like Dollar and Alamo - that really make you suffer with this.  The more expensive places, like Hertz, don't charge as much.  So after much struggling and suffering, we found a great deal.  How great?  The first search came up with $2000 or so for two weeks, and we eventually got it down to $800.  The secret is to use Kayak - and to search for non-airport locations.

To be continued...