Route Planning

Elsa? [P.S. Who Are We, Anyhow?]

July 5, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

We’re nowhere near ready to get moving tomorrow, as nominally planned. Our muscles and bones probably need another good several days’ recovery time — and, of course, The Stepdaughter’s House o’ Canines can’t be beat as a place to decompress.

Unfortunately, we have our last doctor’s appointments in Tallahassee on Wednesday afternoon, around 3:00 pm. So we have two choices, given the approximately six-hour drive in perfect conditions:

Leave tomorrow and stay overnight at a friend’s house in Tallahassee. (This has been the current plan for a while now.)
Leave Wednesday morning and drive straight through to the doc’s office.

But then there’s the small matter of Tropical Storm Elsa… C\

The tracking map as of a couple hours ago is shown at the right. Here at The House o’ Canines, we’re located midway between Port St. Lucie and Palm Beach. We’d probably be leaving around noon tomorrow, July 6; as you can see — note the time stamps for each of the forecast tracks — we should have a pretty clear shot back to Tallahassee over the succeeding six hours. On the other hand, by the time of our appointments Wednesday, Tallahassee may or may not be affected…

…and the medical facility may or may not be open, even if just out of simple caution.

[Aside: another little wrinkle, nothing to do with the weather: we arranged to change our mailing address down here, back in the middle of June. This automatically covered not just our mail delivery but also our drivers’ licenses, car registration, and voter registration. In the meantime, we also had new checks printed with the new address. However, as of today, we have still not received the new DMV papers, or the checks… but we have our updated voter IDs, by God! I went over to the DMV office first thing this morning to see what could be done about the problem from their end… but of course, they’re closed today for the “July 4th Monday” holiday. Argh.]

Well, nobody ever said this had to be easy!

ADMIN: Documenting the Trip in Progress

July 3, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

As some of you know, I’ve been using a route-planning site called Furkot to help me visualize the itinerary we might be taking for the trip. This turned out to be confusing, because other than our starting point and our planned “next destination,” we don’t yet know for sure where we’ll be, when, and for how long. So I emailed the people at Furkot to ask: how do I “plan” a trip only in retrospect — showing the places we’ve been to, but not all the succeeding ones?

I was impressed; they got back to me literally within minutes with several very specific steps to take. At any rate, here (shown in Google Maps) is the trip so far (assuming no itinerary changes over the next few days [*cough* Elsa *cough*])… If you click on the link, it looks like this:

It’s not much so far, of course. But this is generally the sort of thing I’ll be experimenting with until I’m satisfied with the “look,” or until the trip is over. Whichever comes first, ha.

The “Calendar” (as of Sometime in May 2021)

June 15, 2021 by John 1 Comment

Pay attention especially to the green rectangles; they mark off the months when we think — or imagine, or fantasize — we’re going to be in or near those locations. (In this clip, I’ve also grayed-out the areas NOT within the rectangles.) Note that the list of places was current maybe a month ago, so the order has changed some. Also note that — as of today, anyhow — we’re not planning actually to stay at all of these places; some are just points of interest along the way.

Those of you who remember our (thanks, COVID-19!) disastrously anticlimactic “EuroTour 2020” planning may remember the colorful schedule I came up with, Whether you remember it or not, shown at right is a trimmed-down version of the “USTour 2021” counterpart.

(Click on that image to see the first page in full, including how to interpret the various color codes. Glutton for punishment? Click here for page 2.)

As with last year’s “schedule,” our objective with this one is to minimize the varieties of climate we need to pack for. I probably don’t need to tell you that one of us is more amenable to warmer temperatures than the other, and vice-versa for the cooler. But we just won’t have enough room in the car to pack the clothes we might need for every eventuality, no matter when we visit Location X, Y, or Z.

Once you get past September, the choices get narrower and narrower; we need to avoid really cold weather — and the possibility of snow — which likely puts some of the northern- and westernmost regions beyond reach for this trip. No help for it, alas…! As it is, as you can see if you’ve checked out the full page-2 image, even the notoriously roasting California and Southwest states look a bit iffy in November and December…

Who knows, maybe a later version of this schedule will add in a loop through Mexico, Costa Rica, etc.