AI said I was being dumb

So as I have been trying to figure out how to do a road trip to Yellowstone and back in the course of 11-12 days there have been red flags. The biggest flag is the distance/days formula, it sounds pretty brutal. In my prior road trips I have had similar circumstances where I had days with obscenely large amounts of driving and the end result is you return from the trip more or less exhausted. Sure I got to see and experience a ton of things but you have very little time to catch your breath.

So last night I type the following into Google, “is it reasonable to drive from Naples to Yellowstone and back in 11 days” The AI answer was a resounding NO. It recommended a minimum of 16-18 days for such a trip to avoid massive driving burnout as well as give adequate time to explore the park. It offered alternatives based on the 11 day timeline.

One was flying to either the Bozeman or Jackson Hole airport and renting a vehicle. This option would be very expensive potentially but would allow a much more relaxed pace. Another suggestion was simply doing a shorter road trip, it suggested the Smokey Mountains in TN as an alternative. If we picked something that was no more than 1500 miles away it would make a road trip much more reasonable. I also thought about the idea of doing a short cruise but there are complications with that idea too.

Bottom line is now that my original plan has been completely invalidated in my mind I need to see what alternatives sound good to us while being realistic. I don’t have a lot of time to figure it out.

This weekend has no big out of the ordinary plans on the books and that is fine by me.