To which I reply, "No, not this time."

I've come up with appropriate non-creative titles for big, fun events in the past (just ask those involved about the "Birthday Extravaganza" or the "Griswold Vacation" - those certainly lived up to their names), but this one seems right with the generic title. We have no idea what to expect going into this thing. Quite simply, it is a big two week trip.

Ok, so what is the big two week trip?

It's an attempt to spend two weeks on the road with the family hitting amusement parks all along the way.

Am I insane?

Yes I am.

Let's just start at the beginning of this whole fiasco. Last fall I hooked up with a copy of Microsoft's Streets & Trips thinking it'd help with all the traveling we do. The problem was that our traveling was done for the year. The logical thing to do with this wealth of geographic information was plot the locations of as many amusement parks as I could dig up. With the info found on RCDB, I did just that. What I found is that the parks fall into pretty neatly organized regions and the possiblities of future trips just leapt from the warm glow of my computer monitor. I smiled and forgot about it.

A couple of months later the standard preseason casual talk began. Somehow during these talks everyone seemed to decide it might be a good year to do a two week thing. To this very moment I'm not sure why. Before this the most we had done is 5 or 6 days and to be honest everyone is usually pretty fried by the end of the week. But somewhere along the way it was decided that this was the year to go for two. My mind flashed back to that map I had saved a few months earlier. I began pondering the possibilities.

After having way too much fun for a well adjusted adult, I had it down to two real choices. Two weeks in California doing all of the big parks (and a few smaller ones) in a north to south pattern or a road trip making a huge circle from our home in Pittsburgh out to Wisconsin and back. After some rough estimates we got some prices together and realized that the road trip would come in at about half the cost of the west coast trip. Road trip to Wisconsin it was!

There's way to much research and decision making that goes into planning something this big to even begin to detail here. But at some point during that time we realized that the trip as planned left an awful lot of down time. An alternative option was to add a little leg to the loop that put us in Minnesota for a couple of days. We figured in the additional stops and found ourselves with a reasonably priced trip that was tight, but not ridiculous in time or distance. We must've tried to lay it out a million different ways but in the end had something pretty close to the very first plan. Good enough, time to book this all.

As a testament to the planning involved, the first thing I finalized was our hotel room in Minneapolis on March 18 - the last thing I did was make a ferry reservation. That was just two or three weeks ago. Nine months had passed between the time I first plotted the parks on the map and when I had everything necessary bought, reserved and accounted for. Hell, we could've made a baby in less time.

In the end we put together a trip covering almost 2300 miles and 15 to 17 amusement parks over the course of 16 days. A daunting task to be sure. The map at the top left of this page shows the planned trip route. The star marks our starting point and we'll be moving in a counterclockwise following the plan outlined below the map as best we can.

"Ok, so what's with this diary thing?", someone yells from the back.

Well, I've done "on the road" updates in the past so it seems like a fun idea to document the trip on a more dedicated daily basis keeping anyone who might be interested up to date on where we are, what we're doing and who wants to kill who, photos from the day - stuff like that. I skillfully called it a diary to avoid use of the ultra-trendy 'blog' terminology, but lets face it, it's a blog of sorts.

We leave on June 17th and that night I'll begin daily updates from the road, adding a new page for each day at the end of the day. Stop by daily (or more accurately, nightly) and you can follow the happenings all the way to the end of the trip on July 2nd.