Monthly Archives: June 2008

Equipment Considerations

Posted on June 29, 2008 | 3 Comments

Now that we are less than one week from departing, we are collecting together all the equipment we need to packup for the trip. Eventhough space is a premium in the Corvette, there are still several critical things we need to bring to be able to support documenting and blogging all along the way for the trip.

Electronic Items that we are bringing along include:

  • Canon EOS Digital Rebel 300D 6.3M Pixels SLR Digital Camera with BG-E1 battery grip, SpeedLite 550EX flash, EFS 18-55mm zoom lens, EF 24mm wide-angle lens, EF 50mm portrait lens, EF 75-300mm telephoto zoom lens, dual Li-Ion rechargable batteries, battery charger and Tamrac Camera bag to carry everything.
  • Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS 8.0M Pixel Digital Elph pocket point and shoot camera with a pair of Lithium Ion batteries and wall charger.
  • Canon PowerShot A85 4.0M Pixel point and shoot camera (as a backup)
  • Dell Lattitude D630 Laptop with DVD Writer, Air/Auto/AC Power Adapter, USB Optical Mouse and portable CF Card Reader to be able to import pictures from the cameras. The laptop is running Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 with 4GB of SDRAM and a 120GB 7200RPM drive.
  • DeLorme Street Atlas 2009 Mapping Software
  • Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 Digital Photo Editing Software
  • Jeff’s Motorola CRAZR Cell Phone with wall charger
  • Sandra’s Palm Treo Cell Phone with car and wall charger
  • Jeff’s 20GB iPod, Bose Headphones, and USB charger
  • Jeff’s 1.0GB iPod Shuffle (for running) with USB charger
  • Sandra’s 30GB iPod with ear buds and USB Charger

…and last but not least, a spare Corvette Key Fob with Emergency Access key….just in case!

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Posted in Trip Preparation

To Book or Not to Book?

Posted on June 19, 2008 | Leave a comment

Hotels. To book or not to book, that is the question.

We’ve budgeted the month of July for the trip and, ideally, we would like to be able to wing it day by day with no particular schedule other than a rough target number of average miles per day and some knowledge of decent stopping points. However, there are some practical problems including mainly the remoteness of some large stretches and also availability concerns in several locations along the way. This dictates a bit more structure to the trip – certainly for some stops.

Research indicates that some of the stopping points will be problematic during this or any summer vacation season. This is especially true of our major landmark stops and of the towns along the Pacific Ocean. It would make sense to book these ahead of time, but without a fairly constrained plan, we have no idea exactly which nights to book where. We’re not really keen on sleeping in the car or wasting lots of miles to drive to available locations in land, etc.

Hence the question: To Book or Not to Book?

 Sleeping in the Car

Our current strategy at this point is to book specific hotels for each night for the first week of the trip  including what appears to be the most difficult location – Jackson Hole, WY. – our first major stop. If nothing else, having the first week of days booked, gives us more time to consider the plan. We’ve booked each night with the option to cancel or move any booking up until 6:00pm on the day of stay without any cost. This gives us a fair amount of logistic flexibility moving forward, but also guarantees someplace to stay if holding the plan works out.

So far, we’re deciding not to book places in the larger cities because of significant number of options in each. It seems likely we can just wing those or perhaps book the day before as we travel. Before departing for the trip, we’ll also likely book the other major stops on the way because they seem the most risky. If we have to cancel or change it – so be it.

According to the plan, we need to have 25 different hotel bookings for the trip. Walking the value/comfort curve we have primarily selected Hampton Inn and Holiday Inn Express type locations for the single night stops and reserved the more luxury accomodations for the major two-night stops. With a bit of luck, perhaps some of the later stops will be free based on the good customer points accumulated for visits earlier in the trip, maybe!?

 

 

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Posted in Uncategorized

Major Planned Stops

Posted on June 16, 2008 | 3 Comments

The details of the trip are really coming together now. We have scheduled a departure date of Thursday July 3rd, 2008 with a total of 25 different hotels needed over the course of our journey. This is based on staying one night in each location with the exception of 3 major stops where we’ll spend two nights in each of those. This means our trip will consist of a total of 28 nights on the road if everything goes according to plan….or if we don’t decide to change the plan along the way. So, if you plot all this on the calendar, then we expect to be back home on Thursday July 31st, 2008.

The planned overnight stops consist of the following places and some of the way points to be covered on those days. The major stops are bolded and each stop is commented with things we’ll pass getting there:

  1. Perrysburg, OH – Outside of Toledo focused on getting a bit west
  2. Elgin, IL – West of Chicago and still focused on covering some miles westward
  3. Sioux City, IA – The “Field of Dreams” and the Lincoln Highway
  4. Hot Springs, SD – Ashfall Fossil Beds and Black Hills National Forest
  5. Deadwood, SD – Mount Rushmore
  6. Cody, WY – Lots of cool mountains and not much else
  7. Jackson Hole, WY – Yellowstone and Grand Teton
  8. Boise, ID – Craters of the Moon and more mountains and valleys
  9. Portland, OR – Multnomah Falls and Wahkeenah Falls
  10. Newport, OR – This is via Cannon Beach, OR on the Pacific Ocean
  11. Gold Beach, OR – Oregon Dunes and Prehistoric Garndens
  12. Eureka, CA – Giant Redwoods
  13. Santa Rosa, CA – Just north of San Francisco
  14. Half Moon Bay, CA – staying at a nice resort on the Ocean
  15. Monterey, CA – Making our way down the Pacific Coast Highway
  16. Pismo Beach, CA – We’ll drive Big Sur this day
  17. Los Angeles, CA – Beverly Hills shopping and Hollywood, etc.
  18. Needles, CA – Picking up Route 66 this day across California towards the desert
  19. Flagstaff, AZ – Grand Canyon
  20. Albuquerque, NM – Meteor Crater
  21. Amarillo, TX – Midpoint Cafe and Cadillac Ranch
  22. Tulsa, OK – National Route 66 Museum and Edmund, OK
  23. Saint Louis, MO – Maramec Caverns and the Gateway Arch
  24. Bowling Green, KY – Corvette Museum and Plant, Elizabethtown, KY too.
  25. Cherleston, WV – Onward home after staying here

And that is pretty much it! – The main task now is selecting a majority of the hotels for planned stops. Right now the mapping software says this trip is going to be 7388 miles and take 150 hours to drive. I expect this to get slightly shorter as the various stops are tweaked up.

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Posted in Trip Preparation