Go man, I say just go do it.
My thoughts? Here ya go:
You don't always have to have a trip planned out. I've done so many cross-country trips that had only the most general of plans in mind, like "Ohio to San Francisco, you wanna go?" and ended up staying out nine weeks, working at the North Rim of the canyon for a couple weeks and then hiking all the way across, and sleeping on the banks of the Mississippi in Davenport with trains running on one side and tug boats tooting horns through the night on the other, and running dirt roads up in Siskoyou Natl Forest in Oregon 'til we got lost. Slept on Stinson Beach north of San Francisco with the Pacific lapping up close. All sorts of stuff.
Another trip was traveling from Maine to San Jose with no def plan at the start other than get to the west coast and fly to Hawaii, where I worked for three months. Then flew back, picked up my rig, and spent another year and some months traveling and working around the country. Ended up eighteen months gone all together.
This last trip, which I'm just back from end of last month, was meant to be around three-four weeks gathering gear and dropping off stuff I sold here and on Expedition Portal. Ended up being gone sixteen weeks all total, over around 12,500 miles.
It started knowing I had ten specific stops I wanted to make, so required a little more of a planned general route, but I made it very clear to everyone it may be weeks before I got around to their part of the country. Once I had the obligations taken care of in the first few weeks, the rest was all spontaneous and included Overland Expo East, a couple extended base camp experiments, and a lot of wandering in between.
12,500 miles in sixteen weeks is not a lot, really. It is only an avg of around 112 mi/day. Of course, some days would be ten-fifteen miles and other days might be 500-600 miles.
One of the best pieces of travel advice I've ever received is that you can stay out longer if you slow down. You're already in a place, why not check it out more thoroughly instead of hitting the road again soon as you get up. Costs less to stay put for two days than it does driving steady for another two days and you get a hell of a lot better feel for where you've been. Especially if you have a rig you can live out of and sleep in. Even more especially if you have a bike with you or love to walk around town.
Other times in my life on the road I'd head out from some spot or another and intentionally not drive on any interstates or controlled access highways, instead only using the sun as general navigation for the rest of the day or for a couple days. I'd find the best little gems of towns and farm lands and friendly diners. No internet, no gaia maps, no Inreach to help with nav or if stranded.
I spent eight years on the road another time, working all over the country...lot of hotels, lots of camping, lots of vandwelling, but no home address of my own.
In my experience with these trips and many more, you only have to plan your route if you have someone coming along, or need to plan around major events and holidays, or if working for someone other than yourself while on the road. Viaje en solitario, no más plan.
Sounds like you might be like me, in that one of the best feelings to have is reaching the edge of a road after spending the night somewhere, and wondering "Well, I wanna go left, or I wanna go right today?" and then letting the road lead the way.
I'm likely to be out roaming some other part of the country if you ever get up to the Maine coast, but if I'm around, I'll show you around. If we can arrange to meet out on the road somewhere, even better. I'm tentatively planning on a cross-Canada trip and maybe Alaska, depending on time of year, then down to Seattle and Portland, though may drop down to CO for a vendor visit and possibly further down to SoCal for another vendor visit.
Keep in touch, let me know where you are, and if you want to meet up and share a meal or two or have a beer or something.
Dry roads and open skies,
Road
