Since we usually only travel in the summer, we spent the time in between thinking of where to go on the next trip. Over the years we've been to many places, so there are lots of new places to visit. Sometimes we go back to places we've visited before, because we either missed something or liked it so much we want to return.
Trip planning usually features a place we want to go, family or friends we want visit or something we want to do. Normally, our trips combine all three elements. We use many resources to plan our trips.
Newspaper and magazine articles, internet searches, travel books, state, national, corp of engineers books, maps, travel routing programs and others are used to help us plan our trips.
The picture to the left shows just some of the printed resources.
The next picture shows some of the materials we used to plan this summer's trip. We formed in our mind that we wanted to go to another country music festival and go to the tennis tournament held in Mason, OH near Cincinnati.
Some of these materials helped us find interesting spots along the way to determine our route.
In 2005 we attend "Jamboree in the Hills", which is a country music festival held near Belmont, OH in the southeast part of the state. The festival ran over 4 days featuring such artists as: Brooks & Dunn, Dirks Bentley, Trace Adkins, JoDee Messina, Montgomery Gentry, Diamond Rio, Lee Greenwood, Lynyrd Skynyrd, George Jones, and many more. We camped at a state park nearby and attended the concerts all day long starting in the early afternoon.
The tennis tournament (http://www.cincytennis.com/) is being held August 13~21 in Mason, OH. This year is the first time the tournament will host at the same time the men and women pros. It is the last hard court tournament before the U.S. Open in New York. Since we've attended for many years the Sony Ericsson tournament in Miami, we decided it would be fun to go the tournament in Ohio.
Next in the trip planning process was the country concert. Tim had heard many years ago about another location in Ohio that held a festival. Doing an internet search revealed the Country Concert 2011 (http://countryconcert.com/) held July 7~9 in Fort Loramie which is between Dayton and Lima. Linda's sister family lives in eastern Ohio. We could visit them between the country music festival and the tennis tournament. Now our trip was starting to take share. All we need to do is fill in the spaces along our route.
The Lookout Mountain Parkway caught our eye.
We located information about this scenic drive in Reader's Digest, The Most Scenic Drives in America book shown above. This book is wonderful for planning trip routes. We've planned our route and stops in more detail. Details of our trip will be revealed in future posts. Stay tuned.