April 2023: A National Parks and Bourbon Road Trip: Pretrip

Pretrip

Cast of Characters
Me: 36…school SLP, Disney fan, national parks enthusiast, resident trip planner
Nick: 36, seller of Fords to commercial accounts, car napper extraordinaire, bourbon enthusiast

With special appearances by my sister Laura and her fiance Josh. They live in central PA, in that town created around that very large state school. Laura is a graduate of and currently works for that school but is about to change jobs and work for a hospitality company overseeing operations of airport restaurants and Josh works for the postal service.

So…last year when we were planning and booking vacations for this year, airfare prices and rental car prices were horrifying, so it became kind of evident that it might be necessary to either skip a vacation this year (NO) or road trip for one of the vacations. Dad had been talking up the bourbon trail and Louisville to us for a couple years, so we decided this might be the time to cross that off the list. I started playing with potential driving routes and added some destinations to the list. A plan was created, and we were headed to West Virginia and Kentucky for April vacation. That’s where everyone wants to travel to right?

Slowly the trip got booked, and the plans came together. I managed to pay for almost half of our hotel nights in rewards points and free nights certificates, so that was fun. I also found out that Bourbon Trail tour reservations and Mammoth Cave tour reservations are kinda like Disney and have to be booked way in advance. But…we made things work, figured things out, booked our tours, and pretty soon we were counting down the days. The plan was to leave Friday after work and not return until the following Sunday and included 10 states, 5 hotels, 4 distillery tours, 2 national parks, and a visit with my sister. No big deal.

And then things got questionable in ways we hadn’t exactly anticipated. I got hit by some sort of non-Covid virus that absolutely steamrolled over me. It was a 12 hour GI bug immediately followed by a nasty respiratory thing, complete with me passing out as the virus got started, which left me limping for a couple of days, because my knee took the brunt of that fall. This all started a week before departure. Between the knee, the exhaustion and the constant cough, I really doubted whether I could handle all the driving that I’d need to do on this trip, and highly doubted my ability to tackle our tour at Mammoth Cave with its 540 stairs.

Thankfully, the limping ended before I was well enough to go back to school, the exhaustion eased slightly, and the cough became somewhat less consistent and less gross JUST before departure. So we raced to do the last of the laundry, finalized the plans, and packed a massive bag of cold meds, hoping that Nick had somehow managed to avoid this virus, and watching Gizmo come to terms with yet another suitcase sighting. I finished the last of the IEPs and created a new schedule for the week after break that included adding two students at a 3rd school, because the need for services for those preschoolers is just exploding. And then…we were down to one last sleep before vacation!