An update on resources for planning an RV trip to New England.

Round Barns and Covered Bridges

Dale J Travis has compiled exhaustive lists of covered bridges and round barns by state. Each list includes the county in which the bridge resides, the bridge name, water the bridge is built over, the bridge’s length and year built, GPS location, and a photo. Not all bridges have complete entries; most do.

I hope to visit a number of covered bridges in New England. Dale’s lists make this easier for me and for you. He also provides reading material recommendations.

www.dalejtravis.com

New England Foliage

There are a number of website to help tourists visit during peak foliage. I had thought the foliage developed first in Maine and moved south through the states. This is an incomplete picture. The foliage moves from the north-west toward the coast, running from Canada to the sea. I’m now thinking a loop heading north through Quebec, Northern Vermont and Maine; then swinging south along the sea-shore through Maine, and New Hampshire; turning inland toward central New Hampshire; then south and east through Massachusetts, visiting Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket along the way before dropping down through Rhode Island and Connecticut is “optimal”. This will be a rather long haul and will take some time if we keep our daily mileage minimal. New England is not Alaska, there are no vast expanses to be driven in a day.

I have no idea how long this will take. Optimal foliage started in late September last year and worked it way to the coast and into Rhode Island by mid October. That gives us about four weeks to tour the region with time before and after to visit friends and family along the way.

Foliage Resources

New England 2015 projection: yankee foliage
Maine past foliage: www.maine.gov
2014 “Best of”; www.wildcenter,org
A Vermont Drive: drive vermont
Main Resource Guide: visit Maine

I’ll be adding more resources as our plan develops. We use the iPhone app, AllStays, to research state and national parks and RV campgrounds. The app can search near your GPS location or around a city or town. I’ll publish our route once we have one!

Ron

Have you ever started planning a simple thing and found yourself thinking, “but while we’re here we can do XYZ”, often? In engineering we called this creeping featurism. It is the bane of engineering projects in that a well defined series of tasks and their schedule can be severely compromised by what appear to be simple add-ons. I found myself falling into this trap while planning our road trip to New England.

What should be (will be) a quick trip to the north east followed by a long meander through Quebec, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, was becoming a cross country extravaganza that promised to consume two or three weeks before crossing the Mississippi! I mentioned taking I-90 to Ellen earlier today and she said, “We’ll see.” That made me think, what are our goals in this road trip? Answer: to see New England in the fall. What does driving to Seattle and seeing national monuments, state and national parks in the north west have to do with seeing New England? Answer: nothing.

Road trips through the North West, the West, and the South West will be exciting when the time comes. These will be separate, planned, long excursions in their own right. There is no need to “see it all” just because we are driving across the U.S. We will strike a direct path to the North East on I-80, stopping at scenic campgrounds along the way, but not going out of our way to find them. This will be a “mad dash” to New York followed by our trip through the North East states. We may well drive directly back home on I-80 without driving down the eastern seaboard. I will plan for a scenic drive back. We can always change the plan.

Creeping Featurism in road trip planning!?! Plan the execution and execute the plan, so the saying goes. We’ll keep the plan simple, but will feel free to improvise as we go. The plan in this case is a guide.

There are many road trip planners available on the web. One, www.freetrip.com, is reasonably useful but lacks a state and national parks and monuments data base. Another interesting find, there is a road trip planner based on a “where’s waldo” algorithm created by post doctoral researcher Randal S. Olson. It is written in python and the source is available as BSD share-ware. I may tinker with this code set since I have the tools and ability to do so. Most likely, I’ll contact Randal before starting on the project.

Randal was the creator of this map, which may be familiar to you:

In just two short months (2.5 ?) we will be taking a two month “recation” (retirement vacation) to the North East. It is never too soon to begin planning the route “back east” and a list of places to visit once we arrive there. I prefer to keep our itinerary open as much as possible. This avoids being rushed or having to move on from a place we love. This runs counter to the need to reserve space at popular RV sites. There are two schools of thought here: 1. Make reservations at the popular sites and 2. avoid the popular and find your own ‘best of”. I am new to RV trip planning which makes this adventure more challenging and intellectually stimulating.

If you follow this blog, you know Ellen and I have literally “just returned” from a one month sojourn in Italy and Greece with a stop-over in Istanbul and Ephesus. There, trip planning was 100% spot on. Every connection, every apartment, all transportation clicked. We left all days in the cities open for “own plans” to do what we wanted when we wanted with no itinerary. The cruise excursions were the only pre-planned pieces of that entire trip aside from where to stay and connections between.
An RV trip is quite different and comes in four distinct parts: 1. getting to the North East, 2. visiting family and friends once there, 3. driving New England for the foliage, covered bridges, and points of interest, and 4. driving back to California.
Over the next few weeks I will flesh out and/or modify the skeletal outline below as the details of our pending adventure come into focus.

Getting to the North East.
Which friends/family to visit on the way
Which route to take (time of year is #1 consideration)
What to see and do along the way
How long to spend “in transit”
How many miles to drive on average each day
Likely state or national parks or RV parks to stay at
Make reservations ahead or wing it.

Visiting Family or Friends
How much time to allocate for visits
How to divide our time.
An optimal route between destinations
Stay in the driveway/street or at a nearby park

Seeing New England
Create a list of must see spots.
How far to drive per day on average
Allow “down time” days? How many.
Car rental along the way, if so where.
tow setup for rental car?
Trip planning considering RV weight and dimensions and bridge restrictions.
State visitation order and route
How much time to schedule between reservations for new discoveries
Make reservations ahead or wing it, and where.
Tours and/or side trips (e.g. fishing trips, Martha’s Vineyard, the cape, the Presidential range)

Driving back to California
See family/friends
which route returning to California (time of year is #1 consideration)
List of “must see” along that route
how many miles to drive per day on average.
Make reservations or wing it, where, when

General Considerations
How often to stop at an RV park that provides laundry.
How often should we plan to eat out vs cook in.
(Shopping lists and the like are best left unplanned)

There you have it, my “off the top of my head” first draft for extended trip planning.
First up: Which Route to take getting to New England.