Pre-trip Planning

To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.
~Charles Horton Cooley

Welcome to my southern Utah Scenic Drive blog. For those of you who haven’t experienced blogs yet, and I can’t imagine too many of you who haven’t, a blog (web log) is a continuously running narrative that adds text, photos, audio or video on a regular basis over a period of time. The latest material will always be at the top of the page, so as you scroll down through the blog, you’ll be marching back into time.

I’m optimistic that I’ll remember to properly label each post so that you can navigate through the blog more easily. Today’s post discusses my pre-trip planning routine. Hopefully you’re not too bored before we actually get in the car and get underway. (Next entry, I promise!) And maybe you’ll learn some things, too.

This blog is a record of my latest auto trip, which was a tour of many of Utah’s southern National Parks conducted over 9 days in early September, 2007. I have decided to publish this not only to share the anecdotes and photos from my trip, but to keep my hand in writing, and as practice for my planned USA national tour, targeted for the end of next year.

Here are the major destinations along the way:

Day 1: Travel Day
Day 2: Zion National Park
Day 3: Bryce Canyon NP
Day 4: Capital Reefs NP
Day 5: Grand Junction, Co
Day 6: Arches NP
Day 7: Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park
Day 8: Grand Canyon NP – North Rim
Day 9: Travel Day

There will be the occasional minor stops, too. You can see that I’ve packed a lot of scenery into the trip.

This is not the first time I’ve done a solo trip of any length, and not the first one in my Acura TL (whose navigation system becomes part of the story towards the end). But I’ve not seen any of Utah’s National Parks to date, and I’d like to thank Rick Brookes for the idea and for the main route. For the most part I borrowed the plan he gave to his new in-laws for their honeymoon trip a few years ago, but I did add to his route in a few places, most notably my extension of his Utah loop into Grand Junction, CO to scout out retirement possibilities.

I will tell you he did a good job. Here’s a map of the planned route (BTW, clicking on any image will open up a larger version of it. Use your browser's "Back" button to return to the blog.):



A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ~Lao Tzu

Well, that’s not my style, Lao. I used Microsoft’s Streets & Trips software to do route planning. Rick turned me on to this product too, as he uses it for his epic motorcycle tours. This is one of the applications that MS got right (and at the annual upgrade time, Costco usually has some good rebates on it).

MS S&T allows you to plan routes by selecting locations (like national parks!) or typing in an address, or simply entering a city. Once you’ve put in all the destinations and in the order you want to visit them, you can add stopovers at these locations from minutes to days (overnights), and also pinpoint items of interest in the area, including parks, restaurants, hotels and other popular attractions.

One of the features I like is to be able to tell the software when you’ll depart or arrive at a location, and how fast or slow you think you’ll drive on Interstates, state highways and local roads.

When the route is completed, you can print out a map with directions, or even a turn-by-turn strip map. The directions include mileage and times, so when you tell the software that you want to spend 3 hours in Cedar Breaks National Monument, the printout reflects your planned arrival at 12:30 p.m. Mountain Time and your departure at 3:30 p.m.

Oh, and if you’ve set up some of the other options (like your expected mpg), it will do things like tell you when you should consider stopping for gas or add a 20-minute rest stop every 4 hours.

OK, I will admit to being anal, obsessive-compulsive, whatever when it comes to travel. I have my packing checklists, pre-trip prep checklists, and an Excel-based itinerary planned to the half-hour. That’s where I log the hotel location and reservation information. The idea here is that as I do iterations of the route, I can see where I can add a stop, where I need to leave earlier, and when I can expect to arrive at the motel for the night. I also accumulate planned costs here to get an idea of what I'll be spending on the trip.

As I’ve indicated, I plan to treat the Utah trip like my larger journey planned for next year; I’ll post a blog page for each day of the tour, with a few photos of the parks I visited and some commentary regarding my journey. I’ll also provide links to more pictures that the reader can follow if interested.

I will be sorting through my pics over the next several days to select a few of the hundreds I took (actually it was just short of 1300). In some cases, a rock is a rock is a rock, but at other times with the right framing and light, the essence of the place comes out. Occasionally I'm lucky enough to record that on "film". After scanning the pics from each place, it strikes me as amazing how differently the earth was sculpted over time and events. And it turns out, with the right subject matter, it's sometimes hard to take a bad picture!

Anyway, more stories to come and photographs of real scenery, too. I better get this thing posted so my niece, who is due to give birth any moment now if she hasn't already, will have something to read while she's waiting! I promised her days ago...

So, the plan for the tour is up and out by 9am each morning, stopping every 2 hours to stretch and allow the blood to flow through my legs again, and to cruse at about 8 or 9 mph over the speed limit. And to trust my navi system to work in the boondocks, unlike last year’s trip to Denver. See you next time on the road!