Navigation

I'm sitting out on Barb's back balcony, enjoying the beautiful breeze and scenery. 

 
Today, we're doing our grocery shopping to begin the next leg of the trip.  Tomorrow, Thursday, we start the packing.  Early Friday morning, we'll be on the road again, but not for long.  We'll stay somewhere near Winchester, VA, Friday night, then somewhere near Asheville, NC, Saturday night.  We never know exactly where we'll land until we're on the road.  During our first 21 days on the road, we perfected our navigation methods.  While Ray is driving (that's right: Ray never gave up the wheel), I have all my books laid out on my lap and on the dash in the car. 

Before we started the trip, Ray created a really good Excel spreadsheet, showing all our stops and points of interest, with dates, mileage, hours, cities, etc. Below is a screenshot of the file for the 1st part of the trip.   (Sorry it came out blurry, but you get the drift.)

So, as we depart each morning, we know approximately how many miles and hours we want to be on the road that day, and which city to use to start my search for a suitable campground.  Using Ray's spreadsheet, my nifty Road Atlas ($1 on a whim at a thrift-store book rack), the Woodall's guide to campgrounds across the country (purchased specifically for this trip), The Next Exit internet guide (an invaluable book when traveling the interstates), and the KOA guide, I find the right spot for each night.  Then the phone calls begin, to check for availability and prices.  As I've said before, these aren't the kind of campgrounds that we usually visit, but for one-night stands, they've been pretty good. 

When we're at our campsite, or as shown above, at Barb's, we pull out the laptop, too, so we can verify the driving route on Google maps.  Sometimes the GPS wants to take us strange ways, so we like to confirm the route before we take off.  (That was a lesson learned not once, but twice.) 

The Next Exit is a guide to services such as, food, gas, motels, auto repair, rest stops, grocery stores, etc., at every exit along every interstate in the country.  We highly recommend this guide to anyone who plans to drive along the interstates while traveling.  The times that we're on non-interstate roads, we really miss this book. 

I like not having to drive, and Ray likes not having to make any phone calls. (We each think we got the better end of the deal.)  The over-the-road planning gives us a nice distraction while we're trekking along those many miles every day.