How did I plan the trip?

Answering questions from the previous post comments:
I still have more posts to go and plan to provide links and maps of places we visited and stayed, but my logic is this....

I too get overwhelmed by choices and I am the trip planner. I did it for France a few years ago and the task is quite tedious and time consuming, but fun for me. Michael just shows up:)

I knew I wanted to see fall foliage. I knew I wanted East Coast. I knew I wanted somewhere that I'd never been before. Vermont jumped out to me as a cool spot. I had no clue from there except--Hey, Joseph Smith was born in Sharon, VT...where is that? I looked at flights and into VT were pricey and Southwest flew into Manchester, NH. I figured we start in NH, go to Sharon, and find spots along the way. I told Michael that and he said..."if we are up there, I want to go to Maine b/c I've never been." So I looked at flying into NH, going to Sharon, then going to Maine and back to NH. That made a big circle. (click to enlarge) The green dots are the cities we stayed (excluding Sharon, we just went through there). The spot on the top was the White Mountains (I'd heard a good spot to see foliage), and I saw a website for a gorge up there that looke really cool.
I then started looking up B&B's along the way and looked at tons and chose based on price, how it looked (I do judge books by their cover in this sense) and what it was close to along our way. Google Maps was awesome for this because I pulled up a map of the general area and typed bed and breakfast into the search and I got tons of "dots" that had links to bed and breakfasts. It was easy for me to see if they were along the path we planned to take. As you moved the map, the B&B dots adjusted--so cool!

I like the adventure of staying a new place each night, but it is slightly less relaxing b/c we are always on the go.

A lot of the B&B websites suggest things to see in the area, so I read about them and had to decide if we wanted to do them ahead of time. I pretty much had an itenerary for us that we mostly stuck to. A couple of places I had a few things to choose from and we didn't do them all.