“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men; Gang aft agley” – Robert Burns

Sometimes no matter how solid you think your plan is, and no matter how much time you put into it, it may not always work out.

Or to put it another way, if it’s meant to be, nothing can stop it from happening. If it’s not, then nothing can make it happen.

Thus is the case with our big September 2025 road trip, which we would’ve been leaving for about 24 hours after this post goes live. We started talking about this trip in June 2024 and started booking everything in September 2024. Well, due to basically a million things that happened in August 2025, we had to cancel it. And that, that was devastating. We’re using the term “delayed” over canceled generally since the intention is still there to do it eventually.

Here’s the thing though, you can’t let things in life break you. You just have to regroup and redirect.

I’m a Virgo, and if you look that up, Virgos aren’t exactly known for being flexible or super chill when things are taken out of their control. They are however known for being excellent planners. So what happens when a Virgo has to cancel plans that they’ve gotten nailed down to a perfect sequence, especially when that happens the week of their birthday? I had a little crash out, wallowed a little, and then I handled it.

So, with all of that in mind, here’s the fabulous road trip that we had planned. Please enjoy.

Day 1 – Fly to Portland
We’d land in Portland mid-afternoon, get our rental car, and get checked into our hotel. Get dinner, check out some of the sites, a good, chill way to start the trip.

Day 2 – Portland > Washington > Idaho > Montana
Start off with a breakfast food tour of Portland. Food tours are a perfect way to see different parts of a city and their food at the same time, super efficient if you’re in a time crunch.
Head out, drive through Washington and Idaho and into Montana

Day 3 – Glacier National Park
The fall equinox and new moon lined up almost perfectly. And we had a reservation at Village Inn at Apgar, overlooking Lake McDonald for that night. These reservations go live at the beginning of the month a year out (so for every date in Sept. 2026 they went live Sept. 1, 2025). But I was online when those reservations went live and snagged the perfect room for the night. This was the hardest part of the trip for me to cancel, emotionally.

Day 4-8 – All the places
After Glacier, the plan was to keep it pretty loose as far as planning ahead, with more just seeing where we ended up at the end of each day. On itinerary was: Yellowstone NP, Grand Tetons NP, Idaho Potato Musuem, Salt Lake City, Laramie Wyoming, and all sorts of smaller things in the middle.

Day 9 & 10 : Colorado & Home
We had reservations at the Stanley hotel for two nights. The first night was in the “Cowboy Attic”, which is billed as one of their spirited rooms where a ghost of a cowboy might just give you a little forehead kiss goodnight. The second night, we were booked in the Stephen King suite, the room he was staying in when he was inspired to write The Shining. Both of these rooms come with perks like a free tour of your choice and a bottle of wine or champagne (or sparking cider if you prefer non-alcoholic beverages).
Outside of the hotel we were planning to go to Rocky Mountain NP. We also had premium seating reservations at Casa Bonita.
At the end, we were going to drop off the rental car at the Denver airport and fly home from there.

I was going to be able to knock 7 states out of my list (6 for Cheryl since she’s been to Washington before). We were going to see some amazing things. But, it wasn’t meant to be, and like I said earlier, if it’s not meant to be, there’s no way to make it happen.

So what now?
Well, I didn’t feel safe taking our planned trip alone. That’s a lot of hours on highways and in fairly remote areas that I’m not familiar with alone. I already had the days off of work though. And once we got the refunds for everything that was prepaid, I had enough money that was already removed from my budget to do something else, something that felt safer to do on my own.