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Tag: 2012roadtrip
Day One–Wagons Ho!
Miles MPG Avg Speed Today 756 43.6 64 Food
(today/budget)Hotel
(today/budget)AAA Savings
$45.40/$50 $104.80/$50 $6 Today was all about the driving. I picked Aryn up at 10:00 and we were driving by 10:30. Plans have already changed a little, because she’s riding with her friend from Texas on his way home. He drove to Orlando earlier this month, then they flew to New York. So she’s riding with him until we get to Austin – an unscheduled stop on the trip so she can meet his family.
First for the stats-geeks: MPG was as high as 45 and as low as 41, according to the Prius’ trip computer. It was 45 until the stretch of I10 from Tallahassee to Alabama – a combination of the hills and my dislike for that road dropped it.
Yes, dislike for a road decreases gas mileage, because my speed went from 55-65 to 70-80. That road is just hilly and curvy enough to be annoying, but not enough to be interesting.
After dark, my speed dropped back to 55-65 and the last 165 miles averaged 51.8 MPG.
We started looking for a hotel around the time we crossed the Mississippi, but had some confusion. Aryn and her friend pulled off at exit 151 to look for one, but I didn’t get the call from Aryn until I was just past the exit.
There were a lot of hotels there, but after six miles I’d found no place to turn around, so called them to get back on the road. Sadly, that exit was the last hotel availability for quite a while, as the road then starts across a bayou.
The next exit had only a Holiday Inn Express at $99, but it was nearing 11:00 Orlando time, so had to take it.
Up at 6:00 for the 6:30 breakfast – which has an automated pancake machine. Six or seven hours to Austin.
Priceline-The Unofficial Sleep-Cheap Provider of the 2012 Graduation Road Trip
We’ll be using Priceline and BiddingForTravel for most hotel stays during the trip. Bidding For Travel is a forum with tips for successfully bidding on Priceline, as well as postings of successful and unsuccessful bids.
For stops between destinations, we’ll likely just stop along the highway at the cheapest motel I can find, but for the destination cities like Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Seattle it’ll be Priceline using the Bidding For Travel strategies to get the best deal.
Obviously this means we’ll be unable to select a specific hotel when bidding through Priceline, but that’s mostly okay with me. The only place I’m concerned with more than the bottom-line price will be Vegas, where I want to stay somewhere really nice. Frankly, I’d like Bellagio, but any 5-star on the strip will do.
Speaking of Vegas, we’ll be noshing with the Buffet of Buffets. $44.99 for 24-hours of dining at the Paris, Rio, Harrah’s, Planet Hollywood, Flamingo, and Imperial Palace buffets.
Camelbak–The Unofficial “Don’t die of dehydration 3-miles down the Grand Canyon trail” product of the 2012 Graduation Road Trip
The girl-child says she wants to hike the Grand Canyon … by which, she means more than walking twenty feet out onto the overlook and saying, “Yep, that’s a big hole, let’s head for Vegas.” This trip is going to be in July. The Grand Canyon, in case you weren’t aware, is in the freaking desert!
In July.
So I got one 70-ounce and one 100-ounce Camelbak, because it’s July in the freaking desert!
ExOfficio–The Unofficial Underwear of the 2012 Graduation Road Trip
Proving that there is simply nothing I’m not willing to sell in trying to find an actual, official corporate sponsor for this trip, I will be making the entire trip – 24 days, 25 states, 8000 miles, 129 hours of driving, hiking the Grand Canyon, walking the Vegas Strip, and climbing to a glacier on Mount Ranier – on two pair of underwear. The girl-child has not yet been convinced to try this, but I do know she will not like to be three miles down into the Grand Canyon, in July, when it’s 105-degrees … in cotton underwear. That could turn out badly.
According to their website, these are quick-drying enough so that an evening wash of one pair in the sink will be fresh, new and dry come morning. We will be putting that to the test.
The Unofficial Tech of the 2012 Graduation Road Trip
As with my kayak trips, we’ll be tracking hikes and walking with the Garmin eTrex 20. The Garmin Basecamp software will handle editing the GPS track to remove the crap that shows up because I forget to turn it off or reset the track before starting. Basecamp will also be used to geotag our photos … assuming I remember to set the date/time on the camera when I change the battery. It’s 6-to-5 against and pick ‘em for that to happen.
We take that for granted now, geotagged photos, or, at least, the younger generations do – that and the ability to document something with an, effectively, unlimited number of photos.
As I related in the first post here, my parents took road trips when I was young – this was in the early ‘70s mostly. I was at my mom’s recently, talking about this trip, and she pulled out the photo album for those road trips in the ‘70s. Two things struck me: for having spent weeks, maybe months, in some amazing places, there were very few photos and we spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what state some of the pictures were from, much less where in the state.
Today, with 32GB SD cards selling for $25, is there ever a reason not to take a picture? With geotagged photos, will people a decade from now be able to conceive of not knowing, to the meter, where a photo was taken? Even without a dedicated GPS, phones tag their pictures and apps can log the location for later tagging.
That trip with my parents was forty years ago … forty years from now, instead of a few pages of yellowing photos in an album, this trip will still be documented with a Google Earth file with pristine copies of every photo included and exactly placed.
Obviously we’ll need a way to blog while we’re on the road. I looked into tablets, but I’m a keyboard-guy … I don’t like the onscreen keyboards, at least for any significant amount of typing. So we’ll be using an Acer Aspire One netbook along with a Logitech bluetooth trackball (I’m also not fond of pads).
The car itself will be a rolling hotspot, provided through iPhone bluetooth tethering and AT&T. Which likely means there will be significant delays in some new posts as we roll through the dead areas where AT&T has no coverage.
Amazon.com–The Unofficial Place to Buy Stuff of the 2012 Graduation Road Trip
Amazon could almost be an official sponsor. As an Amazon Affiliate, Amazon gives us a percentage of anything purchased through links from this site.
We’re purchasing most of the new items for this trip from Amazon and are using CamelCamelCamel.com to watch Amazon’s prices to get the best deal. CamelCamelCamel checks the price for an item every day and alerts you if it drops below a target price you’ve set.
Toyota Prius–The Unofficial Car of the 2012 Graduation Road Trip
http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/trims-prices.html
Obviously the car that started this insanity is the most important piece of equipment. Toyota should definitely get on-board with sponsoring this trip.
MapQuest is currently estimating the fuel costs at around $800. That’s more than the original $600 budget, but San Francisco and Seattle were worthy additions to the trip, so I’m okay with that. I plan on using AAA’s report to locate cheaper gas, so hope to come in under that estimate.
Over the course of this trip, we’ll be looking at the Prius’ performance, long-term comfort, and the ability of the electrical system to handle the other tech we’ll be using.
Corporate Sponsors
Being an inveterate capitalist, I’ve decided to open the Jackson 2012 Graduation Road Trip up to corporate sponsors. Sadly, I don’t have any actual connections to get the sponsorships up front, so this’ll be on spec.
Over the course of the next twenty or so days before leaving on the trip, I’ll be detailing the items and equipment we’ll be using to make the road trip easier and more fun. Some of these are things I already have and some are things I’ll be buying for the trip.
My dream is that all these companies will read these and send me free stuff. I can dream.
This may be a bit insane
In April I bought a Prius. This, in and of itself, likely isn’t cause to question my mental health, but what it’s led to this summer may indicate that I have, indeed, gone batcrap-crazy.
See, for several years, I’ve been driving a V8 Mountaineer that averages 16 mpg. That resulted in a lot of skipped trips and vacations simply because the travel costs were too much. A $400-$600 monthly gas bill and fills that sometimes hit $80 will have that effect.
So when it came time to get a new car, I went to the opposite extreme. I took my first trip in years to the Keys thanks to it only costing $25 to get there in the Prius.
After that I started making plans to drive up to Minnesota along with my mother in August. This is an annual trip she makes and I’ve wanted to go along for years in order to visit relatives and show my kids where I grew up.
So I put that trip into MapQuest and it came up with an estimated fuel cost of $318.56. Damn. I can’t get a plane ticket for one person for that much.
That got me thinking … or not thinking, depending on how this turns out …
Back in the ‘70s, my parents took me on a couple roadtrips in an old Chevy Van. Massive roadtrips. Like, frickin’-everywhere roadtrips. I was pretty young, but the bits and pieces I remember are some of the coolest memories from my childhood.
I’d always wished I could show my kids something similar, so I started playing with the map to see what a couple detours would add to the trip. Just a little bit, to show the kids some of the amazing things there are to see in this country.
I set an initial budget for gas of $600 – the upper-end of what I’ve been spending each month on gas for the Mountaineer. That got me to Vegas, up to Yellowstone, then back to visit Minnesota and home. But Vegas is so close to San Francisco and Yellowstone is just not that far from Seattle (two of my favorite cities). Well, “close” and “not so far” relatively … relative to already having driven from the other side of the country, that is.
The most recent plan for the trip looks like the map above. The estimated gas cost varies day-to-day as prices change, but it’s around $650 at the current national average or $750 as MapQuest calculates for the average price along each part of the route.
The difficulty with this trip would be having both kids along – my son and daughter do not get along. They bicker. They annoy each other. They do it deliberately, at length, and not nearly cleverly enough to be entertaining. One day of driving to Minnesota I could handle, but both of them in the car for the 120-hours of driving involved in this trip … well, one or both of them would wind up buried in the desert somewhere around El Paso.
How to handle this? Well, my daughter graduated from high school this year. I think this makes an awesome start to a family tradition. I take her this year and then in five years when my son graduates I can take him. A sort of last, big thing to do together before they head for college and make lives of their own.
Also, they’re interested in different things. The girl’s gotten all outdoorsy and adventurous lately; the boy-child’s obsessed with video games, but who knows what he’ll like in five years. Taking them separately I can tailor each trip to what they like.
So the plan for this year’s trip currently looks like this:
Carlsbad, NM Carlsbad Caverns
Bat cavesSanta Fe, NM Sandia Peak Tramway Grand Canyon, AZ Big Hole Las Vegas, NV Hoover Dam
Las Vegas Strip
Ka
OSequoia National Park Big Trees San Luis Obispo, CA Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco San Francisco, CA Too much to list Northern California Lava Beds National Monument Oregon Crater Lake Seattle, WA Family
First Starbucks
Kayaking San Juan Island
Mount RanierYellowstone, WY Yellowstone South Dakota Mount Rushmore
BadlandsMinnesota Family
Lake Itasca
Mall of AmericaChicago, IL Because the girl-child wants to see Chicago … not sure why. Atlanta, GA Shakespeare Tavern Twenty-four days, twenty-five states, 129 driving hours, 8000 miles, two people … in a Prius.
Batcrap, I’m telling you.