Planning v. Spontaneity

I'm an organization "addict" who's primary goal in taking this two month, southern, coast-hugging trip with my wife and dog is to take advantage of some open ended time and incorporate some SPONTANEITY into our life. My vision of this amounts to stumbling upon or cruising into the totally unexpected. People, places, experiences, challenges, feelings, insights, ideas. You name it.

On the other hand, I hereby admit that I have spent the past month trying to PLAN out the details of this trip. I haven't gotten very far because I have been engrossed in solving a problem. That is, What "systems" should I use to gather and arrange and store and retrieve and map out and detail and categorize —and of course list, all those wonderful places, those "main stops" and larger points of interest that will guide our trajectory south and back? You see, I feel the need to pin down (pun intended) some pre-planned points, if only in order to not MISS anything interesting.

(In case you didn't already know this, an underlying fear of the control freak is that if she doesn't control her life, she will miss the good stuff; it will slip between her fingers when she isn't looking, it will fall out of sight and worse, out of mind.)

So, what to do? The question for me has become what and how to pre-plan before leaving, so that we will have less of a need to do so while on the road. My expectation is this will leave us more time to take walks, sit around a camp fire, tour an historic site, converse leisurely with locals, follow our dog's nose down a trail, and generally gape open mouthed at the variations in this country's stunning landscapes. More time to experience that spontaneity.

Getting Down to Business

The main stops:  Boston—Norfolk, VA—Beaufort, NC—Charleston, SC—Savannah, GA—Jacksonville, FL—Panama City, FL—Mobile, AL—New Orleans, LA—Lafayette, LA—Austin, TX—Marfa, TX—Memphis, TN—Nashville, TN—Asheville, NC—Centralia (sunken coal mines), PA—Boston.

Example points of interest: Pea Island Wildlife Refuge, the African-American Heritage Walking Tour, St. Helena Island, the Creole Nature Trail (a national scenic byway), a Second Line Parade in New Orleans, the Carlsbad Caverns, Graceland, and Dollyland.

In my research process, I was hoping to find a single application, so to speak, for mapping out information. I mapped our general route using Google Maps, and that will be our main general guide. I tried Apple Maps which is great for dropping pins to mark places of interest and save bookmarks, but it doesn't work well in other ways. I won't bore you with the details. I also tried using the map routing function on the Good Sam's Club website which is awesome for listing campgrounds and gas stations, but slow and clunky and doesn't interface with ANYTHING else. I'm using a huge stack of maps and guide books that we picked up from the very helpful AAA office, but they are very hard on the eyes and besides, in this day and age, shouldn't we be able to make it all happen at the tip of our fingertips, digitally??? Let's just say that no system is perfect, and no system is comprehensive. Perhaps I need to be less focussed on the system, and more willing to let go. Perhaps that's how I might allow spontaneity to infuse this trip. Hmmm. In  defense of over-planning, this has been an amusing way to fill the long dark northern nights!

And I must admit, it's kind of FUN, too.