McKinney, TX
We're done with the coach upgrade! All the new blinds are in and operational. We only have one that doesn't fit as well as it could, but we have to have our dash cover modified at an upholstery shop to create a little more space for the bottom edge of the blind to fall into place. We'll have that done somewhere along the way (probably AL or CT) and it'll be all good.
We finished up too late today to get on the road and have a reasonable stopping point, so we'll finish out the day here and leave first thing in the morning. It's about 13 1/2 hours driving time to Rick's place in Albertville, AL, so it breaks into two days nicely with a stop in Vicksburg, MS. Vicksburg is just across the state line from Louisiana. We'll basically follow I-20 from Dallas to Birmingham, I-59 to Gadsden, AL, then US-431 to Albertville. I've mapped out the route in this map. When I map out a route, I like to use Google Earth to scope out rest areas, truck stops, and major (i.e., potentially confusing) intersections/interchanges in advance. I've found this to be very helpful in two ways. First, mapping software (Streets & Trips, DeLorme, MapQuest, Yahoo, etc.) can very often give incorrect directions based on faulty data. I've had the software give me some pretty strange directions, and quite often campgrounds are mapped to incorrect coordinates (like the wrong side of the street -- which makes a difference sometimes in a 65' vehicle if you need to turn around). I can also tell which rest areas are likely to be better than others. In some, trucks (and large RVs) have to park nose-to-tail along a narrow access road. This can be tricky for us because we cannot back up with the car attached to the tow bar, and there's no way I want to get out and unhook at a short stop. We prefer the stops where trucks park side-by-side at a 45 degree angle in pull-through fashion, especially if it's for an overnight break.
On this trip, I've been confounded a few times by the relatively low resolution of the images for some of the remote, rural areas in the south. Parts of Louisiana (not New Orleans) and Alabama are low resolution, so I'm guessing as to how good the stops will be. Others areas are fine. This is an example of a "bad" rest area in "good" resolution. Yahoo and Microsoft Virtual Earth weren't any better, and all three have some out-of-date imagery in places (e.g., Rick's house isn't shown, not even the street, and they've been living there for years). Oh well, we'll have to do the best we can. How did we ever survive with just a fold-up map from the Esso station? :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment