Mississippi River Road Trip: Planning Stage

My husband and I have decided to drive the Great River Road with our two kids—ages 4 and 6—this summer. We plan to follow the network of roads that trace the Mississippi, from the headwaters in the northwoods of Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. We'll pass through 10 states and cover more than 2,500 miles—and we'll do it all in two and a half weeks.

Last week, we started to map out our trip. We used Google Maps to determine distances between locations and typed up our itinerary in a Word document. We stayed up late one night trying to determine how to fill up our time.

Should we hang out in St. Louis for two nights? Where should we stay between Memphis and New Orleans? How close is Baton Rouge to New Orleans? Looking at tiny maps that filled the small computer screen on my laptop, I struggled to visualize our route.

At 1 a.m. I said to my husband, "Maybe we should get out a map. A paper map? Do we have one?"

From a closet I pulled out an old lunch box where I store a collection of maps—and dug up a AAA United States map. We cut Post-it notes into thin strips, labeling them with the dates that we'll be on the trip. And then we started to stick them onto the cities we'd like to visit. We moved the notes around until finally our itinerary became apparent in a meandering trail of scratch paper.

Stay tuned for more reports on our upcoming vacation. We'll start the drive on June 20 at the Mississippi headwaters in Minnesota.