The Golden Experience

I just drove 12 hours each way to Golden, Colorado and back to get my son who is a student at Colorado School of Mines, and had a really wonderful relaxing time, even though I did it in two days, and we did not get a crack-of-dawn start either day.
I think there were several elements that made the trip more of a vacation than an ordeal. The first was that we had few parameters to work with. We are madly working on gettting our home of almost two decades into fighting shape to put it on the market to sell, and we wanted to get some progress on that before we left, and the second absolute was that my spouse had a flight out of Denver that he had to be one--but that left us several options in terms of travel, so we chose our departure time by when we felt ready to go.
We had a leisurely drive the first day--we stopped for both lunch and dinner, and did not make the decision to go all the way to Golden in one day until after dinner. We were lucky, in that when we pulled into our 'usual' hotel at 10:30pm local time, there were still a few rooms left. No down side to having made limited plans.
The next day we picked Abe and his remarkably voluminous possessions in the morning, met his wonderful friends, had a remarkably good Vietnameses lunch, dropped the spouse off at the airport with plenty of time before his flight, and started off on the journey home. Once again, no plans. See how the drive went, we would decide where to stop as we went. Which ended up being home. If we had planned to make the trip in two days it would have seemed onerous, but this way it was fun.
The advent of phones that have internet makes this sort of travel luxurious--we ussed Yelp to identify potential restaurants en route, and we knew we could find and book hotels should we need them. We had the ability to assess quality of food and accomodations in the palm of our hands. An additional plus was that we had an audio book for each leg, which definitely helps the miles melt away. Can't wait to go back!