#Schummer14: what it took to prep for the Summer of Schnyder 

On Friday of last week, I hit send on an email submitting the final two articles that I owed my clients and FINALLY felt like I could exhale and shift my focus to preparing to be gone for 30 days.

It was the same feeling I remember having each semester of college when I would take my last final. And similar to how I felt the last day of work before the mandatory three-week furlough all Cessna employees took in the summer of 2009.

It’s a feeling of freedom, of not owing anyone any work for weeks and knowing work stuff won’t be piled up when I get back. If you haven’t felt it yet, you need to.

Lee and I have been planning this trip for months. But, really, our ability to take this kind of trip takes us back at least 15 years to the big picture and daily decisions we’ve made throughout our lives together. For example, we choose to live in a small house, we do not have children and we carry no debt.

The short version of our planning steps:

Where: Based on getting Lee to Toronto to see a Blue Jays baseball game, we looked at where else we could go in the region.

Route: Lee spent hours crunching the numbers to figure out several options, with our final route fitting into our four-week timeframe the best. The options weighed flying, driving or a combination of flying and driving. We are visiting six states we’ve not previously stayed the night in (our prerequisite for marking a state off the to-do list).

Plan activities: We could spend a week or more easily in each of the states we are visiting but that didn’t fit into our timeframe so we made a list of must-do activities and must-see places.

Choose accommodations: Once we knew what we wanted to do, we had a better idea of what cities we’d be in. TripAdvisor is our friend. And reward programs; thank you Marriott. Oh and we found a condo for Toronto on VRBO.

Prep the house: Put mail on hold, find someone who could stay at our house while we were gone, time food purchases in the last couple of weeks just right

Prep the car: Have vehicle checked out, sign up for cheap satellite radio package to use during 30 days of driving {we can only talk about our feelings for so many hours}, have fender-bender five days before departure date {that’s a whole notha post}, have battery die two days before departure because dumbass {that would be MeLinda} decides to clean interior and leaves previously-mentioned radio playing and doors open while cleaning for an hour, have panoramic sunroof {favorite part of this vehicle!} start malfunctioning day before we leave

Prep ourselves: get prescriptions filled, plan haircuts accordingly, contact credit card companies so they can put a note on our accounts to allow purchases outside our usual territory, contact Verizon to find out about using our phones in Canada

Pack: I couldn’t get my head into packing until I got all of my paid work done, which means the past weekend was spent doing laundry, buying essentials for the trip and packing. We even took empty suitcases to the garage to see what would fit in the back so we know what we have to work with.

Now, we’re ready to go if I can find room in the vehicle for the huge stack of magazines that have piled up for the past six months.

~~~

#Schummer14 – Lee & MeLinda Schnyder are turning their home in Wichita, Kan., over to a friend and taking a month-long road trip. They’ll travel from Kansas to Ontario and Quebec, Canada; then through Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. The trip home will include stops in Ohio and Missouri. Beyond the blog, you can follow #Schummer14 on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.