This is my mother-in-law; her name is Jutta Engelhardt. She lives in Frankfurt, Germany. In the middle of May, if all goes well, Caroline and I will pick her up at the Phoenix Airport. This will be her longest visit yet with us, about six weeks.

Soon after her arrival, we are scheduled to leave on a cross-country road trip. On previous visits, we have visited Yosemite National Park, Monterey, and Carmel, California; Las Vegas; the Grand Canyon twice; Chaco Culture in New Mexico, Monument Valley, and Tombstone, Arizona; hiked in Zion National Park; and made snow angels at White Sands National Monument. More recently, we visited Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, New Orleans, and the Everglades, snorkeling in the Florida Keys, drove the Blue Ridge Parkway, visited the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, where we hiked a short distance of the Appalachian Trail, been to Graceland, and Hot Springs National Park which is also the childhood home of President Bill Clinton.

This road trip has had more than 100 hours of planning go into the itinerary and looks like this: Drive hard and fast from Phoenix to Albuquerque, New Mexico, next day drive 825 miles to about 100 miles outside of St. Louis, Missouri. On the third day, we drive 846 miles to Ashtabula, Ohio, visiting Hermann, Missouri on the Missouri River, and the St. Louis Arch before passing over old highway 40 through Indianapolis and Cleveland.

On the third day of the trip, our sightseeing really begins as we slow down for the next two weeks. The first stop is Niagara Falls and a night in Buffalo, New York, followed by a visit to Ithaca along the Finger Lakes, then onto Vermont, New Hampshire, and then New Bedford, Massachusetts to visit the Whaling Village. Down the coast to Mystic Seaport before entering New Jersey for a visit to New York City to see Central Park and the Empire State Building.

Next, we take an early morning tour of the Statue of Liberty and visit the Amish area of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, followed by Washington, D.C., over Deleware and the Chesapeake Bay to Chincoteague and south to Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, and Cape Hatteras. We begin our trip back west with tours of the area south of the Great Smokey Mountains, continuing onwards towards Nashville to catch the Natchez Trace Parkway. After a couple of hundred miles on the Trace, we again drive west across Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, into New Mexico, and finally back to Arizona.

Over the remaining weeks, we tentatively plan on visiting Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands, a train ride on the old Cumbres & Toltec steam train from New Mexico into Colorado, and finally, a possible return visit to Las Vegas.