Newbie Cross Country Adventure
We just purchased a 2015 Keystone Cougar 28RBS travel trailer and so far we absolutely LOVE it! We have had a few great adventures! Due to business, I need to be in Dallas, Orlando, and New Orleans ne...
Forum Discussion
Planning. I'm big on planning.
My advice is to go through the tour books to find the things you would like to see and do (what interests you, not what interests me) that could be somewhere along the way, with moderate detours and side trips. Once you have those places as ideas, connect them, figure out travel times, and the amount of time at each place. Then figure out about where you need to stay overnight, find places for that.
Then you need to see how much of it fits your schedule of where you must be when, so you can make the hard choices about what to leave out of this trip, maybe save for another trip. Of course, if it is a round trip, some can be caught on the way out, some on the way back, which can be a somewhat different route (circle trip).
The tool I used for planning travel the past ten years has been Streets and Trips, which Microsoft has just announced it will discontinue (along with all of their GIS tools). What I liked about S&T was that I could manage travel rates, put all my stops with durations for the stops, and it would calculate trip times for each segment and the whole trip. When I re-routed to add or delete places I wanted to visit, I had new routes and times almost instantly, so I could do a lot of "what if" trips (and save each variation).
DeLorme Street Atlas (which is also included in DeLorme Topo) is supposed to do the same thing, using different maps and different point-of-interest databases, but I've not yet fiddled with it enough to know how easy it is to work for trip planning.
You can do somewhat the same with online tools, but I find they are less responsive and it is more work, more time, building a set of trip plan variations. On the other hand, point-of-interest data, particularly for commercial properties that buy listings, will usually be more up to date.
My advice is to go through the tour books to find the things you would like to see and do (what interests you, not what interests me) that could be somewhere along the way, with moderate detours and side trips. Once you have those places as ideas, connect them, figure out travel times, and the amount of time at each place. Then figure out about where you need to stay overnight, find places for that.
Then you need to see how much of it fits your schedule of where you must be when, so you can make the hard choices about what to leave out of this trip, maybe save for another trip. Of course, if it is a round trip, some can be caught on the way out, some on the way back, which can be a somewhat different route (circle trip).
The tool I used for planning travel the past ten years has been Streets and Trips, which Microsoft has just announced it will discontinue (along with all of their GIS tools). What I liked about S&T was that I could manage travel rates, put all my stops with durations for the stops, and it would calculate trip times for each segment and the whole trip. When I re-routed to add or delete places I wanted to visit, I had new routes and times almost instantly, so I could do a lot of "what if" trips (and save each variation).
DeLorme Street Atlas (which is also included in DeLorme Topo) is supposed to do the same thing, using different maps and different point-of-interest databases, but I've not yet fiddled with it enough to know how easy it is to work for trip planning.
You can do somewhat the same with online tools, but I find they are less responsive and it is more work, more time, building a set of trip plan variations. On the other hand, point-of-interest data, particularly for commercial properties that buy listings, will usually be more up to date.
