These next few posts are going to be about a fantastic road trip that I just recently took over the weekend of my birthday. This will serve as the introduction.
Logistics were a bit... interesting. First, I had to fly to Chicago to meet my traveling companion. He had flown to Chicago from Richmond earlier in the week, met up with his wife in Michigan, driven to her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, where we would actually set out on the trip, headed for Richmond.
I was able to use my frequent flier miles on United to get a super-saver ticket, which only cost me 8750 miles plus $5. The only downside is that I misread the times, and booked what I thought was an 11AM flight that ended up being an 11PM flight. Doh! While I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to meet my Uncle Mark (who lives in Chicago) for lunch, for a free flight, I guess I don't have a lot of choices. Side note - I tried "Mobile Check-in" for the first time, which had me using my smartphone's web browser to display a 2D barcode that could be scanned at TSA and upon boarding. I printed a paper pass too, just to be safe, but didn't end up having to use it. Welcome to the future!
Friday night found me going through airport security wearing steel-toed boots and carrying a motorcycle helmet under my arm, which went surprisingly smoothly. I refrained from making any "this is my insurance in case the plane crashes" jokes until we landed in Chicago.
So, I should probably pause here and explain how this all came about, and why I'm carrying a motorcycle helmet (and jacket) on an airplane bound for Chicago.
Chris, my best friend from college, has been living in Orlando, Florida for the past few years. He met his wife there, and they were married last year. He and his wife both have motorcycles, specifically Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200s. However, when his wife moved to Michigan to start grad school (MSU, but we won't hold that against her), they moved most of their stuff and the motorcycles to be stored at her parents' house in Kenosha, WI, with the assumption that Chris would move into the general area once he found a job up there. Chris just recently got a new job in Richmond and moved up from Orlando in early summer. Not exactly close to Michigan, but closer at least, and definitely closer to me, which I'm ecstatic about. So, I've been after him to bring his motorcycle back down so that we could maybe ride together sometime. However, he wasn't really keen on having to load the bikes into the in-laws' truck and trailer and drive them down from Wisconsin, especially after already having to do that once when he moved their stuff down to Richmond. I suggested that they could ride them down, but he didn't figure that his wife would be overly interested in riding all that way. I immediately volunteered (assuming that they were ok with me riding one of the bikes, of course), and so that rapidly became the plan - we just had to figure out what weekend to do it. Well, coincidentally the best weekend for all concerned was the weekend of my birthday, and my very understanding wife agreed that this would be a most excellent birthday present even if it meant she had to be a single parent for a few days, so here we are.
Chris picked me up from the airport late Friday night in the in-laws' bright orange Ford Mustang GT convertible, and despite the fact that it was probably only 55 degrees out, we rode back from the airport with the top down (and the heat blasting). Nothing like romping on the throttle of a big V8 with an aftermarket exhaust while driving under an overpass with the top down to put a big, stupid grin on your face!
With all of the pre-trip traveling covered, I should talk about the actual trip planning a bit. It's pretty easy to get on the interstates and haul yourself across a couple of states at best speed in a day or two, but a real road trip is as much about the journey as the destination. So, I decided to take a page from my Dad's book on road trips and plan a more interesting route, one that avoided the miles and miles of tedium that most interstate travel represents in favor of secondary highways, small towns, etc - actually see the country instead of just driving past it at 80mph. So instead of just plugging everything into Google Maps and hoping for the best, I started doing some research.
I found two great websites, here and here that had maps/gps coordinates of scenic drives or otherwise interesting roads. I started with a list of candidates from all of the states/regions that I knew we'd have to go through in order to get between Kenosha and Richmond. A number of the routes I found on the Open Road Journey website were actually day-trip style loops, so I had to figure out which part of those to use in order to make forward progress, and then set about changing the route on Google maps to string those together and get a rough route laid out.
Once I was mostly happy with the route in Google Maps, I had to find a way to extract that as something that my GPS would understand, as I wanted to at least try using the GPS instead of a map and paper directions. Google has a button that says "send to GPS" and I thought, "AHA!" Well... all that does is send the destination address, which is pretty much useless. None of the multiple waypoints were coming over, so it was time for plan B. There are websites (little script bookmarklets, actually) that you can use to extract Google Maps directions to a file that your GPS understands, which worked like a charm. Once I had that, Garmin has this cool (free!) program called Base Camp that will use the maps in your GPS and allow you to import and export routes, change waypoints, as well as load the route to your GPS's memory. There was a lot of tweaking to be done, because I discovered that once I actually got zoomed down far enough a lot of the waypoints that Google generated were not technically on the road, so there was a lot of U-turns and doubling back to actually reach them that I had to fix. After all of that was sorted out, I was able to play back the route to determine stopping points based on distance and time so that I could figure out where we were going to stay each night, possible lunch and fuel stops, and the like, based on the fact that we'd basically have 3 days to make the trip.
Highlights of the route included riding along Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, through West Lafayette (Purdue), past the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, through parts of the Monongahela and George Washington National Forests, and a bit of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. It took me a good portion of Labor Day weekend to hack on this and get the route the way I wanted it, but looking back on it from this end, it was totally worth it! Next post - Day 1.
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