Travel Tangents

To the (no doubt) glee of you all, I am planning a road trip.  Where am I going?  You’ll find that out in a couple of weeks so be patient.  I’ve already started my standard preparation (cache lists for all the counties, identifying which towns are county seats, special caches, interesting stops according to Atlas Obscura).  You’ll probably be confused, but my biggest preparation issue that comes up is routing.  It’s easy enough to figure out your travel times and distances when you’re only dealing with one or two locations.  You would be amazed how much harder that becomes when you’re dealing with 40 or 50 locations instead.  Most of the standard mapping choices (Google Maps, Bing Maps) only allow you to show 10 locations at once (Bing used to do 25 but something went wrong on their end).  Other more robust route planners require to make accounts and that is a bridge too far for me; I have too many accounts with various things as it is.  Sure, I could generate an email address just for it, but I’ve spent a long time whittling myself from a dozen down to two so that’s not going to happen.  A lot of people reading this might be singing the praises of Cachetur, but I don’t use it because it’s a little too good.  It’s great if you’re planning to go from specific cache to cache, but I don’t use that kind of specificity.  I have to go to a county courthouse and a cache and the order in which that happens doesn’t really matter, so it doesn’t work to have things be too granular.  All I need it something that can get me from town A to town B and when I get to B, I can find the courthouse (usually).  Then to a cache if I didn’t stop for one on the way there already.  With offline lists of each county to work with, I don’t even need cell service necessarily. 

You know what I end up using the most, though?  Did you know that Project-GC has a route builder?  It handles a starting location, final destination , and twenty-five locations in between.  Chain together two such maps and I can usually get the time and distance information I want.  Supposedly you can save your generate route maps to use for various Project-GC searches, but they’ve never saved for me like that, which is fine because I don’t want to use it that way really. 

Some days, when I look at how I plan these things, I feel like an analog man in a digital world.  I emphasize feel because I very much know I’m not.  For lack of a better term, I’m more of a crypto-luddite, opposing the downsides of newer, less proven, more invasive technologies but using more antiquated versions of them over simpler and more labor-intensive versions.  I’m not going to use route-planning software or sites because I don’t want to provide that much information regarding my habits and intentions, but I’d never be hunched over a map book with pencils and highlighters either.  I don’t want much.  I just need someone or something that I can trust will not betray or undermine my privacy that can read my mind and make it possible to route all the places I want on one map and easily move around locations at will on the fly!  Is that too much to ask?

So anyway, I’m going on a road trip, and that right soon.

[UPDATE] In between the time I wrote this post and the time I posted it, I have learned that my plans are going to have to change. This sucks, but it is what it is. The best laid plans of mice and men…