At long last, I’m excited to share our basic Busload of Books tour route…

…courtesy of tons of hard work from Robbi who painstakingly worked around weekends, holidays, weather, and geography to schedule all 52 schools we’ll be visiting next year.

She entered all the dates and addresses into this cool road trip mapping software to get a general sense of where we’ll be and when. Click here to play around with the map.

I say “general sense” because, other than the schools themselves, our itinerary is not set in stone. The current projected distance is 21,757 miles (not counting the 4,000-mile drive home from Anchorage).

But between now and departure, we’ll be adding many zigs and zags—to visit friends, explore back roads, and discover the off-the-beaten path wonders you’ve been telling us about.

Note that this map excludes Hawaii. We’ll be flying there from Atlanta in February.

In the days ahead, we’ll be adding new stops to this map, asking for your help in brainstorming more places to visit, and telling you more about each of the schools on the tour.

But this is where we are at the moment. I’ve never been so excited about a squiggly line.