Holiday planning 2019 here we come !
Well, yes, you guessed it ! It’s been a while since our last USA tour so our plans for 2019 are 6 new states to experience and tick off our list – this time in the Mid West and Great Lakes region of the country🌽🌽🌽😂.
This will certainly fill up our map in this part of the USA and will leave us with just 7 states in the east to complete the “Lower 48” states. (No prizes for guessing what plans for our 2020 tour might be ! 🗽🌭) And there are 5 National Parks we can cover in this area also, including a couple of the least visited parks. (NEWSFLASH – now 6 with a new NP as of February 2019 !)
After keeping her “observations” for months and months on the availability of Qantas Frequent Flyer seats, Adrienne has snagged us great seats again so its time to start the countdown timer ! And of course there will now be months and months of fine tuning our plans as we edge closer to our next big adventure !
We briefly flirted with the idea of a VERY BIG trip covering this Mid West area then driving across the country to Los Angeles – and taking in parts we have plans for in future “USA Revisited” tours ! 😀 However we have gone back to our original idea of just one big loop – in and out of the same location.
Originally that was planned to be Chicago, however what worked better for our flights was to use Omaha, Nebraska, as our “in and out” point ! (For those after the detail – In, we fly SYD/LAX/OMA and out OMA/DFW/SYD). But we’ll only get about an hour in Nebraska to start – State number 37 – as we leave the airport, cross the state line, and head for our first nights stop in Iowa.
After a few stops around Iowa, we’ll cross the north of Illinois to Chicago and then the top of Indiana as we get around the southern tip of Lake Michigan, and on to more of our new states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota. We will then cover a bit more territory in South Dakota (a state we visited on our 2009 tour when we went to Mt Rushmore) as we head south from North Dakota and finally back to Nebraska – to see a bit more than just the airport ! Oh, and there is a little dip into Kansas – more on that when the time comes !
Perhaps like our Central USA Tour in 2016, there will be less of the well known “stand out USA” sights on this tour – the “Mid West” has a bit of a reputation of being nothing but cornfields ! Yes, I can vouch for the fact that in some states there seems to be nothing but cornfields, however, when we’ve been able to see over the cornfields 😂 there have been some real highlights on previous trips – the “quirky America”. And we do have a lot of fun hunting to find them !
Not giving too much away just yet, it may be “Highly Illogical …”, but we’ve got some good stuff lined up already !
The States we’ll visit on our 2019 Tour
Let the countdown begin !
Woo Hoo!!