Understand when I say it’s not easy to plan a road trip, but planning a 9 days long road trip over 5000 miles going across 11 states in a pandemic. There are a few important tips when we were planning the road trip, especially in the pandemic year. We decided to go just before the fall starts and almost the end of the summer, it was around the 1st week of September we decided to start our trip.
1 . The road we should take should have good number of rest stops (like a big open area for a rest stop).
2. Plenty of drive-thru restaurants on the way.
3. Good stock pile of handsanitzer, disinfectant wipes and N-95 Masks.
Above were the extra precautions we have to take for a pandemic, and now let me take you through the planning we did to execute this road trip. Because it has to be executed with perfection because we have to come back by Sunday afternoon so that we can have a good amount of rest for the Monday office.
The trip’s starting date was September 6th, 2020 and the ending date should be September 13th, 2020. So we had almost 7 full nights and 8 days for us to complete the trip from Chicago to Yellowstone National Park and come back to Chicago. So plan was
Chicago (IL) -> Rapid City -> Badlands National Park (SD) -> Mount Rushmore (SD) -> Jackson (WY) -> Yellowstone National Park (WY) -> Salt Lake City (UT) -> Bonville Salt Flats (UT) -> Omaha (NE) -> Chicago (IL)

Planning for the trip and places to visits:- Keeping in mind we will be almost doing a 4.5K miles trip we tried to make sure that we kept our driving days because on a driving day we wanted to cover as much stretch. This would have helped us to spend some quality time on the places we wanted to visit. We kept our driving limit to 14 hours.
Below is the list of the places which you can cover on the way to Yellowstone National park from Chicago and vice versa.
- Badlands National Park
- Mount Rushmore
- Yellowstone National Park.
- Bonville Salt Flats
Day 1:- September 6th, 2020:- We started early on the 1st day of our trip in Chicago keeping in mind that we have almost 13 hours drive to our first pit stop in Rapid City, SD. So it was a goo
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