Things to see and do

I’ve written some Python to start plotting things we might wish to see.

This is a plot of all ghost towns. Who knew there were so many?

And a start to general things in red, and “Muffler Men” in blue.

The Route

Still 1000 days to go, but I was thinking about the route. Fly into Chicago. Down Route 66 from Chicago to California (shown shoddily in red), then up through Nevada before zig-zagging East until Maine. Down the East Coast towards Florida then West into the Deep South and then North East back to Illinois to fly back from Chicago.

I don’t believe we’ll decide on a more concrete route than this. It’ll be a case of following this rough plan, booking a hotel one day in advance and making sure we set one point a week that we need to hit to make sure we get back in time.

The broad aim is to drive under 15,000 miles in the 90 days, as that’d be less than three hours a day in the car (in theory).

Video

I think I’ll probably video the trip for my own memories and I wanted to animate my logo for that.

Where to begin?

Where to start?

There are four considerations.

1. We’d want to end up in the same place as we started because there’s always a hefty fee if you want to drop a car off in a location outside of the one you picked it up from.

2. I think closer to the East Coast makes sense over the West, because why have a longer flight?

3. Cost. Always, cost.

4. Is any particular hub better for nailing a few states quicker?

So, where does BA fly direct to? Assuming the website I looked at is correct the list is:

Arizona	Phoenix
California	Los Angeles
	San Diego
Colorado	Denver
Florida	Miami
Georgia	Atlanta
Illinois	Chicago
Louisiana	New Orleans
Maryland	Baltimore
Massachusetts	Boston
Nevada	Las Vegas
New York	New York
North Carolina	Charlotte
Oregon	Portland
Pennsylvania	Philadelphia
	Pittsburgh
Tennessee	Nashville
Texas	Austin
	Dallas Fortworth
	Houston
Utah	Salt Lake City
Washington	Seattle

Let’s put the states on the map for a proper look.

There’s an interesting page over at http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/data/usa/states.html which shows someone’s carefully planned route. They were trying to navigate the 48 in just four days. At 6,850 miles over 90 days, that’s only about 76 miles a day which is very leisurely. This is their map below.

It’s hard to see on the above map would I image it’s a lot of Interstates and that’s great for speed, but doesn’t make for an interesting trip. There are useful tips from the map though. Mostly that the square states tend to abut each other in a way where a quick loop and you can whoop through four in a thrice.

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There’s a good page on using the Travelling Salesman problem to calculate the optimum route but visiting all the major landmarks along the way. You can go and read the article but yourself if you’re interested, but here are the figures.

224 hours of driving. So, 2 1/2 hours a day over the 90 days. Still very doable.

Also, it begins and ends at the same point.

http://www.randalolson.com/2015/03/08/computing-the-optimal-road-trip-across-the-u-s/

Questions

Sure it’s a long time away, but planning and mainly saving.

1/ Getting three months off work.

2/ Paying for it.

3/ Doing it.