We’re planning to set out on our adventure at some point within the next few days, and while we don’t have a set itinerary or exact route planned, we have been doing a bit of research into places that we might want to visit. Read on to see how we’re using Google Maps to keep track of things, and take a look at our ever-growing list of places we’d like to see!

Using the Google Maps engine makes tracking geographical points of interest easy!

There are already plenty of excellent tutorials on how to use Google Maps to facilitate road trip planning, so I won’t get into the details of how I set things up. I do want to share the map that Lori and I have been collaborating on over the past couple weeks, as well as a few words on how we’re planning to use it on the trip.

First, here is the link to our map. If the map is empty when you open it, make sure that the various layers are enabled (checkboxes along the left).

The first thing we did was add all 58 national parks to the map (minus a few that we’ve visited recently), even though we don’t intend to try to see them all. We’re willing to go out of our way to visit a few big ones that we’ve never been to (Glacier, Yellowstone, Yosemite), and we’ll stop at any of the others that we end up in the vicinity of.

Then, over the past couple weeks, we’ve slowly been adding additional points of interest to the map—from obvious touristy-type things (like Mount Rushmore), to some more obscure attractions. Since we’re both photography nerds, we also created a separate layer to mark exceptional photo opportunities.

We haven’t added any actual driving routes to the map because we probably wouldn’t end up sticking to them anyway. We have a vague idea that we’ll circle the country in a counter-clockwise direction (heading out towards Montana & Glacier National Park first, and then turning south, and eventually east), but beyond that we’re just going to wing it.

While we’re on the road, I hope that we’ll be able to rely less on hitting up Google for “interesting stuff near me” every day, and mostly just pop open our map to find local attractions that we already know we want to do. Let us know if we’re missing anything!