Road Trip Honeymoon!

Yay!

As my tentative wedding date approaches, one fun thing I get to do is plan my honeymoon! My fiance and I have decided that this is one thing that we would like to do, take a honeymoon. A while back he actually mentioned Hawai'i to me, and I was kind of lukewarm about it, until I actually started doing research on Hawai'i. And then I decided that I want to go to Hawai'i. Really, really badly. So I pray inshaaAllaah that one day I'll get to take a vacation in Hawai'i.

However, a number of reasons make it not the ideal honeymooning place for us. One such reason is that another trip he and I would like to make is a cross-country drive before I move in with him. The cross-country drive would solve a few logistical issues and be a nice time to spend together. The drive alone, however, will take at least 4-5 days of solid driving. That means a lot of time spent in a car, but it doesn't (to me at least) amount to much of a honeymoon.

So inshaaAllaah, if we go through with this plan, we'll make a number of additional stops along the way, at State Parks and the like. In some parts of the country there are so many places to stop, that we'll have to turn some down. And some other places we'll just be driving right through.

A few days ago I bought a giant Rand McNally road atlas to start looking at potential routes. This book is huge, with maps of some states taking several pages. For instance, there are 16 pages of maps for just California! The maps also show state parks and "scenic routes." Since it's a cross-country drive, we'll try to maximize the amount of natural beauty we can see by taking scenic routes where possible.

So far, I'm planning a trip that lasts about 12 days. We'll be taking a southern instead of a northern route, even though it's shorter to go north, because the trip will be in wintertime, inshaaAllaah, and I'd like to minimize the amount of snow we'll have to deal with. While I think that routes through Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho are gorgeous, there probably won't be so much to see if it's all covered with snow--plus, it's likely that if we take a northern route, we'll be in snow for most of the way. Interstates and such will probably be fine, but we don't want to have to stick to the interstate.

So even going south, there's still a ton of options, so I've made a few notes as to destinations I'd really like to see. The full country map in the atlas looks like this right now, with post-its labeling all the sights I'd really like to see.

I don't know of anything in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, or even New Mexico that is really important for me to see. Has anyone traveled that way of know of some good stops along the way? That's probably where we'll be on Friday, so we may be stopping around the Texas panhandle for jumu'ah wherever we can find a mosque inshaaAllaah.

Any thoughts about cross-country driving?