Finalizing Plans for the (EXTENDED) Cannonball Run!

June 9, 2023

About three months ago, my friend Jake and I started planning for our Cannonball Run trip (feel free to read the background on that here). While I had provided general information about the trip, a lot of the details were not included such as our vehicle of choice or our "official" route (which included changes as recently as June 8) and vehicle of choice.

The Vehicle

Let's think hypothetically for a moment. If you were trying to take a road trip across the United States, what would you want to drive? Would you want your own personal car? Would you want a large SUV to cram every item you own into it? Maybe a cheap car focused around getting the best fuel economy possible? How about a sports car to enjoy fast roads? 

Well, we decided to go with a rental and our selection would make the Griswold's envious Our (current) vehicle of choice is a MINIVAN because what better way to spend an American vacation!

So why did we pick a minivan?

• I receive a corporate discount through my employer. The best "deal" (based on percentage off the total cost of the vehicle) was on a minivan
• Sports cars were unavailable for the trip (at least based on the rental agencies site)
• Lesser vehicles such as sedans were smaller and the same price, while comparable SUV's were significantly more expensive with little-to-no discount applicable

The hope is to not end up in a minivan. Ideally we are able to shift out of it upon arrival in New York into something that we deem more "fun." Fingers crossed!

The "Official" Route:

When planning any trip, it's easy to say what the highlights are but once you get into the granular details things tend to change a bit. 

Our original idea was a conventional Cannonball Run (Manhattan, NY to Los Angeles, CA), but we felt it was overplayed if not targeting a timed run. The crazy part is that the conventional Cannonball Run was the shortest possible route to go through.

We took a step back after considering the conventional Cannonball Run primarily around what would make this the most memorable trip possible. We wanted it to be unique and explore areas that we had not hit on previously, but start and end in the same places as the conventional Cannonball Run. Since I have previously completed two previous cross-country roads trips (the largest was Huntsville, AL to Denver, CO to Los Angeles, CA to Atlanta, GA), trying to develop an entirely new route was difficult.

Our second planned route was a northward route involved going from New York to Billings, MT with a single stop in Chicago, IL before making our way southward through Utah. From Utah, we would work our way westward through Reno, CA and over to the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) for our final drive to Los Angeles. We ran into a couple of issues with this route though:

1. Potential for forest fires leading to cancellations
2. Road closures due to landslides from record high snowfall in 2022/2023

Due to the potential issues stated above and desire to see more national parks, we decided to pivot the second half of the trip (second half refers to everything after Salt Lake City, UT). Our revised route (as of June 9, 2023) follows the same northward route as our second route, but now explores a number of additional states including Arizona and Nevada (with a potential stop in Colorado and New Mexico). I believe the total now stands at 18 states and nearly 4,000 miles across 10 days. After months of research, several potential directions to choose from, below is the final route:

As we start preparing to pack and ready ourselves for the upcoming trek across the United States, I will try to provide a couple of additional updates. In the meantime, I guess I'll have to spend some time with my new latest project...