Our Ultimate North American Route

Michael and Lisette (mostly Michael), spent almost 3 months researching to come up with a route tat would allow them to take in all 48 of the lower US states along with a few Canadian provinces. This route is specific to us as we had already roadtripped extensively throughout the west coast while living in San Francisco and didn't need to revisit many of those places, even though they were some of the most amazing destinations in the country. That's why you won't see Yosemite or anything really along the HWY 1 coastline from San Diego to northern Oregon.

We'll do our best to keep updating the route from red to green as we make our way along. Please note that there will likely be a delay of at least a few days while we're on the road.

Due to the challenges of living on the road, it is significantly more difficult to perform some tasks. One of those is renewing Michael's Australian passport. While it is not due to expire until the end of September, that means he will not have 6 months remaining when we re-enter the US from Canada and that could cause issues.

Given this fact we have decided not to cross the border into Canada on this trip. This gives us an extra 24 days to re-jig the itinerary and make adjustments to the route. 

Below is a work-in-progress of those changes but we are always open to suggestions on what might be good to see that isn't a huge diversion from the original plan.

In the map below you will see some different colors now. Green is still where we have been, red is the original route, orange markers have been added to reflect potential new stops and the orange lines indicate potentially new routes. The blue lines indicate where we have removed sections of the old route and finally the purple markers reflect the stops we were going to make in Canada (that we are missing now).

We have started to narrow our plans down but still leaving a lot of room for flexibility as we are now pretty sure we don't want to spend so many nights in big cities and prefer to camp out in nature. Below is the most recent updated map.

Things first got slowed down in Salt Lake City where we spent almost 2 weeks. We then spent a lot longer in Washington, seeing more of the state than planned and with Michael flying back to San Francisco for a dermatologist appointment.

We are now just under the halfway mark of our trip and have moved over to the eastern half of the country where we will zigzag up and down, taking in the so called "flyover states". This section will see a lot of long driving days through vast farmlands.

Having surpassed the 6-month mark we are really starting to feel like the trip is moving faster and faster. As you can see from the latest map, we extended the route in a few places, even making it back over to Iowa to visit the Field of Dreams. The heat has really been a big factor over the last few weeks which has forced us into RV parks, thus increasing the budget.

We also had our first ride-along visitor with Martynas coming to join us from Cincinnati to Nashville.

WE DID IT! We completed the trip through all 48 lower states of the United States. 

As you can see, we decided not to finish our trip in Florida and to instead, continue our journey through Central America to Nicaragua. We entered Mexico and traveled through Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras before finally ending the trip in Granada, Nicaragua.