Road Trip planning for this fall

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:

OptimalRoadTrip US

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