Planning a Road Trip

I collect minutiae.  I don’t recall it, but I do collect  t!  Well, at least when I travel.

When I was growing up, we took lots of road trips.  We drove to the east coast, and to Canada.  We drove once to Mexico City.  Days were filled with traditions.  We always started early.  Very early.  Dad liked being on the road by 6 a.m.  We’d stop about 8 for breakfast.  When they came along, the tradition changed ever so slightly in that breakfast would be Egg McMuffins at the first McDonalds we came to.  Dad loved those Egg McMuffins!  We’d drive through the day, long drives, til nearly 8 at night.

Mom always liked stopping at places of interest.  Dad not so much.  You get in the car, and you drive until you get to your destination.  Interesting sites along the way do not constitute “your destination”, so you do not stop at them.  In the ongoing battle between turning trips in to something somewhat educational by stopping at historical markers and the like, and driving without stopping until the destination is reached was not a hard fought battle.  Mom won.  Almost all the time, Mom won.  But she learned to temper her requests.  Dad got long stretches of driving, Mom got to stop and see things.

As I grew older, I helped with the driving somewhat.  I learned that one drives until one gets to the destination.  It’s the way I am.  I’m not big on sight seeing all the little roadside museums along the way.  And with the interstate system, driving to the destination without stopping at those little museums is so much easier.  I suspect I’ve missed lots of interesting stuff along the countless miles I’ve driven.

One other thing I learned at the seasoned hands of my father on those long road trips is the collecting of minutiae.  Driving minutiae, to be precise.  Dad and I kept simple logs of our trips.  Mileage of each segment of the road.  Cost of gas.  Gallons of gas.  Time on the road.  All these little tid-bits of data were carefully collected, written down, surveyed and then forgotten once the destination was reached.  The FINAL destination, that is… HOME.

Dad was also very inclined to detailed planning.  He knew what time we’d depart, precisely the roads we would take, which towns we’d stop in along the way for gas and for eating.  He never quite caught on to planning for those sightseeing forays of Mom’s.  And yet… and yet, even with those unplanned stops, we always made our planned stops.  And almost always on time!  It just dawned on me.  Just now.  You don’t suppose he was smarter than I thought, do you?  Maybe he didn’t bother planning the stops, but he must have taken them in to account.  Those detailed planning sessions began a day or two before the trip began.  And the detailed plan for the return trip began almost the very moment we arrived at our goal!

Today, we have so many more tools at our disposal.  In those days, planning involved stacks of maps.  Dad was not opposed to going to AAA for their Triptiks.  He loved Triptiks.

I no longer begin my roadtrip planning with stacks of maps. Or with Triptiks from AAA, though I DO love those tools.  No, I might not ever even look at a paper road map during my planning.

Google maps, and MapQuest, and RandMcNally online provide my mapping needs.  But, like Dad, each leg is carefully planned.  And there’s no room for sightseeing!

Planning for our currently planned California trip began 3 weeks ago.  All potential permutations of the drive were considered. Some of these didn’t include driving.  I looked in to driving the car and staying in hotels.  I looked in to flying out and renting a car and staying in hotels.  I looked in to taking the trailer along.  The trailer won.  Of course.

I looked in to driving I80 to Sacramento, then south to Orange County, stopping at Yosemite along the way.  I looked at the possibility of driving via Denver, St. George, UT, and then through Las Vegas on to Orange County.  And I looked at the “southern route”.  South won out (the weather, of course!)

Next I planned each leg of the journey, taking in to consideration hours of daylight, speed and expected miles per gallon.  Finally, I set about making arrangements with campgrounds along the way.

Next, I assembled my own version of a Triptik.  This is a one inch binder with tabs for each day of the trip.  In to each tab, I inserted the appropriate form of camper checklist (Departure list, Arrival list), a printout of the email from the campground confirming the reservation.  And (drum roll please) my Minutiae Form.

This is a printout from a corresponding Excel spreadsheet.  Each page has places for the starting location for the day, the name, address, phone,  website and cost of the day’s destination campground, a place to enter the starting time and the ending time.  There’s a section for recording data about each fill up along the way (place, miles drive, gallons purchased, cost per gallon, total cost & time of stop).  There’s a segment for entering other, non-planned purchases.  All this goes into the binder.  At the end of each day, this information will be typed in to the Excel Spreadsheet, and the mpg for each leg of the day’s trip as well as the overall mpg for the day will be automatically calculated, along with the cost of the day.

And finally, the GPS is pulled out, and each leg of the journey is input so that each days journey is at our fingertips.

And when the trip is over, I’ll never look at the data again (except to enter the pertinent data in the trailer’s log book.)