Quote Originally Posted by rebeccajanet View Post
There are some days that have quite a bit of driving (7, 8, or 9 hours) which seems like a lot to me but I suppose that is normal for a road trip?
There's nothing wrong with having a few days where you spend a lot of time on the road, but then expect those to be days where you are mostly just driving. The problem with your plans as you've laid them out, is that you on many instances are trying to do both full day activities and do nearly a full day of driving.

Others have laid out several instances of this, but the biggest offenders are clearly Redwood to Santa Cruz - which would be a very very long day, that that's before you even try to see SF; Disneyland and then a 5 hour drive? That's not insane, that's suicidal, before you think about "seeing vegas" then following day before another 5 hour drive to the Grand Canyon. El Paso to San Antonio is a good 9 hours, before your detour to Carlsbad, so now you're looking at 12+ hours of driving and you hope to see the caverns on top of that.

You've scaled things back from your originial goals, but not all that much. When you consider the fact that instead of going to the east coast, which is 3000 miles away from your home, you're now shooting for San Antonio, which is still 2500 miles from home, you're still looking at a very ambious distance, and still trying to do more than what time will actually allow.