The log entries have moved under the map so as to keep the map toward the top ... This is a little map of, well, whatever. For now it just contains
random places I'd like to visit on my trip, perhaps, though
geographically it's going to be hard to get to some of them. 01/18/2011
- It is with a heavy heart that I have chosen to eliminate Memphis from
the trip. I found a BBQ joint in Alabama that I really want to get to
and it was more conducive to the drop down to Texas, so whole hog BBQ in
Memphis has been eliminated. I continue to refine the route in an
effort to shorten it a bit. That big pointy thing up in Minnesota may
not stick around for long ... 01/23/2011 - I
found out that Google Maps only lets you have 25 points on a route, so I
couldn't really edit it that well. I ran out of points. So I decided to
break it up into 400 mile segments, which I think is a conservative
estimate of how much ground I can comfortably cover in a day. The bad
news is that it winds up being 18 days, which I don't have. So I'll have
to try to get a little more aggressive in my distances or cut more
stuff out (Atlanta and Minnesota, perhaps.) It'll be interesting to put
all the points I want to go to in the GPS and have it do the math to see
how far their route is. It might be better at trip planning than I am.
:) I also notice that Google Maps is kinda sucky at editing long
segments of a route. It'll seemingly put invisible points in the line,
way off road, and mis-report the distance. It's getting to the point
where I will have to start using something else for the planning. 01/24/2011 - I plugged all my destinations into my GPS software and it tells me the round trip is a bit over 7300 miles long, which would put my target average over to 500 miles a day. I'm thinking some refinement is in my future... I've uploaded the current GPS plan to the below map, which is how I'll be doing the rest of my planning. Google Maps just isn't cutting it for planning a trip this long. 01/30/2011 - I think I've refined as much as I can and I'm now down to around 6850 miles. That's still a lot of miles per day so maybe I'll have to skip another destination or something. Another thing that's irritating me is that if you notice, the blue line on the below map stops after 25 waypoints. I wish there was a way for it to automatically break up your imported routes. In any case, it's not that difficult to look at the phantom waypoints on the map and imagine the blue line connecting them. 02/05/2011 - I'm officially going to be camping, at least a little bit. I purchased a tent and a sleeping bag online yesterday. I also pared down my route to 6714 miles. I don't think I'll be able to cut it down any more, unless I end up skipping some of it and coming home because my ass hurts. Ha ha. That's a very real possibility. The good news is that Atlanta is back on the route, so I can try the friend-recommended Fat Matt's Rib Shack. With my goal of touching the Atlantic Ocean, it was hard to avoid going through Atlanta. I literally tried 25 or so points on the East Coast to hit the Atlantic and the route got shorter the further south you went. Anyhoo, I think this route is pretty much finalized. I'll take a finer look at it soon to be sure there are no weird blips near any of the waypoints. Then I'll start planning out gas and sleeping stops. 02/06/2011 - Okay. I'm down to 6689 miles. I scanned the entire route at a rate of about 10 miles at a time and found a few places where my waypoints were off a bit. If you're zoomed far out on the Garmin mapping software, it may not pick a freeway or city center, so I had a few places where it was needlessly telling me to get off the freeway then get right back on. I've also forsaken attempting to get the stupid Google map to draw the route, since it stops at 25 points, which is stupid. So just imagine a line connecting all the dots above. Ha ha. Blue pins are places I'm going to visit, and the other white dots are points on the map that are there to force the GPS to take a specific route, instead of the most efficent route between the two nearest pins. I have to kind of force it to take more rural roads and not stick on the freeways the whole time. 02/09/2011 - Grand Canyon, out! Hoover Dam, out! Yosemite, out! I decided to cut out more things in the west because I live here and can go there any time. This cut a couple hundred miles off the route. I also added some camp sites in the north and south I'm going to try to get to, while still having to average less than 500 miles a day. I think I've pretty much got the route finalized, though I'll probably still cut some things on the fly. 02/20/2011 - I added a few more campgrounds to the route, plus I broke it down into one-day chunks. I found out something dumb about Google Maps. The above embedded map only displays the first 'page' worth of stuff that's listed when I'm editing the map, but then this view has no control to allow viewers to move to other pages. So I arranged it in such a way that my route segments are on the first page. That's why you now just see the whole route and not any of the stopping points. Plus, you have no way of knowing how my days are split. As if you care. Ha ha. You'd think this free mapping thing would work a little better. I demand satisfaction! 03/29/2011 - Just finalized the route, though you can't tell from the map above since Google still refuses to draw the whole thing. Lame. I made some small changes, like taking a bunch of rural routes through Appalachia and taking a coastal route through Santa Cruz on the last leg. Can't believe how fast this is creeping up on me now. 04/29/2011 - Okay, so I tweaked the route a little bit again. I just can't stop. I decided that I was putting too much BBQ on the map and that I should just find things on the road more as I go. Also, a bunch of tornadoes just ripped up the south and killed a couple hundred people, so I've dropped the route a little further south to go along the gulf coast, which also means ... New Orleans! I actually managed to make it so the route is less than 100 miles longer than it was before, and I think I can tweak it out a little more to get rid of that extra 100. 05/08/2011 - My route is officially official. It's loaded in the GPS and everything. I got my drink holder. I got my bug repellent. My checklist is done and I was only about 350 bucks over budget. I'm ready for action. Over and out. |