We've got you into how to create travel plans, now something about how to use them.
I would work for weeks to plan a 3-5 week trip in great detail, including times and places for all the rest stops, meals, fueling stops, touring stops and overnights. Once started on the trip, we would see more places along the way that we wanted to stop and see, and would improvise the rest of that day. By the third or fourth day, we could be a whole day off schedule.
It could get even worse: three days to get from Wichita Falls to San Antonio, a six hour drive on US-281, should have made it in one day. But we started out by going through Archer City to see Larry McMurty's used book emporium and spent the whole first day there. Should have gotten to San Antonio the next day, but stopped to visit LBJ's boyhood home. That's the way it goes. Another trip, three days to get from Oklahoma City to Clovis, New Mexico, and doing that we still skipped Palo Duro Canyon.
There is so much to see, you can't put it all into a plan, or at least I can't, because then the plan starts looking like 50-100 miles a day, and my mind rebels about the pace. So I have a general plan, these are the major places I want to see, and I'll adjust it as the places I find slow me down.
Tools for that? The improvising part, we visited public information centers, welcome centers (almost every city over 15,000 in the west has one) and talked to the volunteers, who know what is interesting in their area. Talking to them, they help figure out what interests you.
Where to stay each day? Sometime early in the afternoon we would pull out our hard-copy directory (had Trailer Life and Woodall's alternate years, liked Trailer Life better) to find out what was on the road ahead in the time window for stopping for the day. We always did this where we had cell phone coverage, to call ahead and find out who expected to have space.
Then each evening I would get out the laptop, fire up Streets and Trips, and reschedule the rest of the trip, adjusting destinations to make sure we would be where we needed to be when my wife said we needed to be there. What I liked about S&T was not needing an Internet connection to do the basic route, time and distance planning.
I think you will find clearances and weight limits a non-issue if you plan to travel on highways designated for over-the-road commercial traffic, and follow the truck routes when you get into towns. These roads are marked on the Motor Carrier's Road Atlas, which also maintains lists of sub-standard clearances. There are a lot fewer clearance problems on rural highways in The West, trucks were running the roads before the current highways were built, most clearance issues are for things that are greatly oversize like wind generator parts, oilfield equipment, farm equipment, refinery and chemical plant parts, and manufactured housing. You will have fewer problems with clearances than you will with having to dodge the really big stuff not permitted on the Interstates, or getting stuck behind it. FWIW, the oil field service guys like to move the portable drilling rigs on weekends when they'll interfere less with commercial truck traffic; or maybe that's the only time they can get a permit to move it.
Going into the Northeast, going into towns and cities, that's another story. To get where you want to go you will find yourself going where trucks are not supposed to go, and sometimes that's about clearance rather than weight limits.
Tom Test
Itasca Spirit 29B
