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May. 8th, 2018 12:08 amI've been rather quiet recently mainly because I've been sitting here researching the roadtrip to Texas for this year. When I'm planning a trip, it's actually a REALLY lengthy process, and I've been working on just one half of the trip for about two weeks now.
1) I have to find a route home. Basically, I tell Google Maps to take me from Seattle to San Antonio, turn on "No freeways, no tolls, no ferries" and let it generate a path. From there, I move the path around until I see a route I want to take, preferably one I've never taken before. For example, here's one of my favorite trips: https://goo.gl/maps/o3vDV665yJ82
2) I take that trip, and break it down to 7.5 hour chunks. This is actually a lie - it SAYS 7.5 hours, but will likely end up being 12 hour chunks. Here, we have stops in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Texas: https://goo.gl/maps/ouvLh3cRpTv
3) Now we need to make sure each of these towns has a hotel I can stay at. In this case there's none in Hayden, Townsend, Powder River, Kit Carson or Aspermont and instead the route is tweaked to Coeur d'Alene, Helena, Casper, Limon, Abilene. This can cause some considerable "skew" as two of the days are now nine hours long, and the route is now slightly different. In time, I may tweak to other cities to get that time back to 7.5 hours, but only if there's a "payoff" to lengthening another short day: https://goo.gl/maps/Am9GVhPpvKM2
4) With the days "locked-in" now I actually go through the route from satellite view, making sure (A) the route is safe (100 miles on a dirt road in a Colorado winter with no services made me a little gun-shy about just blindly trusting my GPS - https://goo.gl/maps/xPCE5ieqvJL2 ) (B) Tweaking the route if I see any side trips or attractions look good.
5) With the days AND the route "locked-in" I'll go over the trip one more time, using websites like Roadside America and Atlas Obscura to research attractions they know about, and that I didn't notice, and tweak the route one last time so we see those attractions worthy of a quick stop.
6) It all gets transposed into Mapquest (yes, THAT Mapquest - their GPS is WAAAAY better than Google Maps for roadtripping) and I just follow the voice for five or six days to my destination.
And that's how Jenn plans a roadtrip. :)
1) I have to find a route home. Basically, I tell Google Maps to take me from Seattle to San Antonio, turn on "No freeways, no tolls, no ferries" and let it generate a path. From there, I move the path around until I see a route I want to take, preferably one I've never taken before. For example, here's one of my favorite trips: https://goo.gl/maps/o3vDV665yJ82
2) I take that trip, and break it down to 7.5 hour chunks. This is actually a lie - it SAYS 7.5 hours, but will likely end up being 12 hour chunks. Here, we have stops in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Texas: https://goo.gl/maps/ouvLh3cRpTv
3) Now we need to make sure each of these towns has a hotel I can stay at. In this case there's none in Hayden, Townsend, Powder River, Kit Carson or Aspermont and instead the route is tweaked to Coeur d'Alene, Helena, Casper, Limon, Abilene. This can cause some considerable "skew" as two of the days are now nine hours long, and the route is now slightly different. In time, I may tweak to other cities to get that time back to 7.5 hours, but only if there's a "payoff" to lengthening another short day: https://goo.gl/maps/Am9GVhPpvKM2
4) With the days "locked-in" now I actually go through the route from satellite view, making sure (A) the route is safe (100 miles on a dirt road in a Colorado winter with no services made me a little gun-shy about just blindly trusting my GPS - https://goo.gl/maps/xPCE5ieqvJL2 ) (B) Tweaking the route if I see any side trips or attractions look good.
5) With the days AND the route "locked-in" I'll go over the trip one more time, using websites like Roadside America and Atlas Obscura to research attractions they know about, and that I didn't notice, and tweak the route one last time so we see those attractions worthy of a quick stop.
6) It all gets transposed into Mapquest (yes, THAT Mapquest - their GPS is WAAAAY better than Google Maps for roadtripping) and I just follow the voice for five or six days to my destination.
And that's how Jenn plans a roadtrip. :)
