One of the most important criteria for an enjoyable vacation is making it stress free.  Sometimes that means eliminating points of interest.  Trying to pack too much activity into a given day means you don’t have the time or energy to enjoy any of it.

When we took our first major roadtrip in 2011, we scheduled 6 to 8 hours a day of driving.  In theory, that would have left us 4 to 6 hours of site seeing time in a 12 hour day.  We should still have had 4 hours for buying gas, eating meals, and so forth with ample time to sleep.

Unfortunately, it didn’t always work out that way.  Sometimes, the driving took longer than anticipated.  In others, the site seeing and picture taking became extended.  When you check out of the hotel and start on the road at 9 am and don’t reach your next destination until 9 at night, the day is just too long.

At several locations, we didn’t have time for any site seeing.  Pictures were snapped quickly, sometimes from a moving car.  Sometimes we spent hours driving along empty roads to reach an interesting spot when it was too dark for good photos.  

As we have gained experience along the way, we have learned to make the drive times shorter and space our stops better.  Hopefully, this time, we will arrive before sunset.  Spend a couple of hours checking out local points of interest and then take time to go back and photograph them the next morning before moving on to the next location.

Toward that end, we’ve scheduled multiple days at major locations like the Yosemite area, San Francisco, and New Orleans.  We are also returning to some previous places like Phoenix where we weren’t able to spend any time looking around on the last trip.  In 2011, we passed Saguaro National Park, but we got there at dusk.  We could see the forest of cacti around us, but it was too dark to explore and the photos we tried to take didn’t even begin to show the mystery of the scene.

The park is between Phoenix and Tucson.  It’s about 2 hours from Phoenix where we’ll be spending the night.  So, we’ll spend the morning exploring Phoenix, then start for the park after lunch.  We should be there with plenty of daylight left.  It’s another 5 hours to our El Paso hotel, so we’ll have a long day.  But the pictures will be worth it.