Episode: 3920
Title: HPR3920: RV Trip 2022-2023: Southeast US
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3920/hpr3920.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:20:44

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,920 for Friday 11th of August 2023.
Today's show is entitled RV Trip 2022-223 Southeast United States.
It is part of the series travel.
It is hosted by Avocad and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, step one for a month's long RV trip is the planning.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in my ongoing series on RV travels.
And what I'm going to do this time is talk about our trip to the southeast, which we did
over the winter of 2022 to 2023.
And in this episode, what I want to do is talk about how we get started with this.
And the start is planning.
We plan our trips.
I know there are people who just hit the road and wing it.
I don't like being out on the road, not knowing where I'm going to sleep tonight.
So we do plan these things.
Now, we had a great time, last time, in the southwest, and it was certainly good enough
that we wanted to do another trip.
But Sheryl and I do not like to repeat ourselves a whole lot.
The one exception of this is that we actually made two trips to Ireland, but generally we
like to go to someplace different.
So we thought about that and we thought about, you know, our plan originally was we wanted
to visit some NASA facilities.
And we thought this might be a chance for us to make good on a little of that at a few
of those to this trip.
And we also made a few decisions based on our previous experience.
The first, we took the length of the plan trip down to about three months and ended up
being slightly less than that, actually, for several reasons.
Now we had planned four months last time and then had to reduce it to three and a half
months when I had some medical issues.
And then by the time we got to the end of the trip, we decided that three months would
be even better.
And because of other plans we have in the spring of 2023, we needed to be home by the
middle of March at the very least.
So I started our planning with a departure date of December 15th, aiming to be home no
later than March 15th.
So I opened up RV life's trip wizard in my browser and started a new trip with the
beginning date of December 15th, leaving from our home.
Then I made a trip, a change to our trip settings.
We found that our plan drives of 300 miles ended up being too much, particularly when
the mileage crept up to 330 or more.
So I changed our planned driving radius to 250 miles and started.
One other thing we discussed was that instead of the five days of daily driving that we
did getting to and from the Southwest, we should stop for a few days at a time to keep
refreshed and maybe see some local sites.
I found that with a two-day drive we could get to Nashville, which is a city we wanted
to see anyway, so I plugged in an overnight stop in Kentucky followed by a week and
Nashville.
From there Memphis was a one-day trip, so I added seven nights there, then another one-day
trip would take us to Huntsville, Alabama, the first of our NASA stops.
From there I was looking to get to the Gulf Coast around Mobile, but that was too long
a drive, so I found a stop in the middle of Alabama near some parks where we could find
some hiking opportunities and do some sightseeing and put in a three-night stay followed by
a short drive to the Gulf Coast where we could stay for seven nights.
From there another one-day drive would take us to the floor of the Gulf Coast, just south
of Tallahassee, then we would go to St. Augustine, which is one of my wish list stops before
we planned this, and for this stop I made it nine nights, then it was on to Cape Canaveral
in the Kennedy Space Center for another nine nights, then we start the gradual movement
north since we will be in February by this point.
A three-night stay near Gainesville, Florida sets us up for a week long stay in Savannah,
Georgia.
Now, I visited Savannah once a really long time ago, I was a child, but I remember that
it was a beautiful city well worth the visit, and then we could move a little bit north to
Charleston, South Carolina for a four-night stay.
This is another lovely southern city with a lot of sightseeing opportunities.
Then on to Asheville, North Carolina for five nights, then to Berea, Kentucky for four nights,
finally a week in Cincinnati, Ohio before returning home on March 12th.
Now at this point it was just a draft, and you know, subject to a lot of change, I had
not made any RV park reservations, and that things can always change when you get to that
step, and I had to get approval from my wife, that this was a plan that she was on board
with.
Now the next steps would be to check the route for any steep grades or elevations, which
would mean adjusting the route, and we also wanted to research a little more on things
to do in each stop.
What we don't need to do is pack each day with activities.
We learned last time that days offer a good thing, you know, we're a couple of senior
citizens hitting the road, we don't need to overdo it, and sometimes the weather may be
bad, sometimes you just need to rest, and about once a week you need to do laundry.
And we got to a good rhythm by the end of our trip last time, and I hope we can pick
up where we left off, but I think we have a good starting point with this plan.
We just need to do a little more planning over the next couple of weeks.
So I had wrote all of that on August 8th of 2022.
Well, on August 20th, so not quite two weeks later, I came back to it, so we took our
graph plan and did another check, this time looking at how steep the grades would be.
We've got a good truck to be sure, but we don't like a lot of steep mountainous roads,
and our draft had us in the vicinity of the Appalachian Mountains.
We use Google Maps, which can be set to give a topographical view.
But an even more helpful tool we found is something called Flattest Root, and I have a link
to this in the show notes if anyone wants to know about this particular application.
This can show you the Flattest Root between any two locations, with a histogram of both
the elevation and the grade along your route, the maximums and minimums of both, and even
suggestions for modifying your route by adding an intermediate stop.
Now the homepage, when I looked at it, used all US examples, but I also did try your
European examples.
Did you know that going from Berlin to Torrin goes over the Alps, has 2,000 meters of elevation
in 12% grades?
Well, now you do.
We also made use of the topographic maps, and there's a link in the show notes to this,
this is a federal US federal government site.
But I would bet there's probably similar things available in other countries and other regions.
And even this site does have some information from other places.
If you enter using US English as your language, that will display all US, but you can change
your language or just search for the area you're interested in.
I could bring up the area, for instance, while using US English as my language.
So it can be useful to do a little research if you're planning some travel.
Now when we reviewed our first draft, we had some grades that were a lot higher than we
were comfortable with.
Now we'd encountered a 10% grade while towing our RV last winter going into Clifton, Arizona.
And that was pretty much a white knuckle experience for us.
So we wanted to be more comfortable this time.
And it turned out that with a little work and a few modifications to the plan we could
make it happen.
Our new plan had us drop Nashville, but we swung a bit west through Indiana and came
down to Memphis.
We went to Huntsville, Alabama for a few days, then returned to Memphis for an overnight.
From there, we went to Vicksburg, a major civil war site, and then onto New Orleans.
From there, we moved along the Gulf Coast to Mobile, Alabama, then into the Florida panhandle
near Tallahassee, then signed to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, and then up
to St. Augustine, Florida.
This is followed by Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina.
Then we go across Georgia into Alabama and Mississippi.
Then north through Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana before returning home.
Now this trip, our plan, we managed to hit three of the NASA sites that were on our
list.
The US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the Stennis Space Center outside
of New Orleans, it's actually in Mississippi, just across the border, and the Kennedy Space
Center in Cape Canaveral.
This is shaping up to be a really nice trip, and we're looking forward to it.
A few days later, I wrote that once we had checked all the grades and elevations, it was
time to start making reservations.
RV Trip Wizard gives you telephone numbers for all the camps, so it's pretty easy to
just run through the list and make phone calls.
This can lead to more changes.
For instance, a couple of places we called were not open in the winter months.
A couple more did not make reservations as far out as our planned trip.
Now, since we don't like leaving things to chance, we looked for alternatives.
It is more comforting to set out knowing that you have a place to stay each night.
So over the next week, I made phone calls to lock in our stays.
By August 30th, I had all of that done.
So it was then time to prepare the book.
Now we started the book on our last trip and learned we can improve it.
The idea is to have a book that has all of your stops in order and all of the planned
routes.
Now remember, we have a big rig to tow, so we can't just take any road.
We have to make sure it will accommodate our rig.
You can go online and find tons of videos of people in RVs running into a low bridge
and either just losing things off the top like their air conditioner or worst case smashing
to pieces the entire RV.
We don't want to do that.
So RV Trip Wizard gives us safe routes.
We're also investigating a few other things.
The thing you have to bear in mind is that, well, Google is great for driving directions
for a car.
It's not great for what we're doing.
At one point, we ran into a traffic jam and Google talked us into taking a detour that
took us through a residential neighborhood and it was very uncomfortable.
We not only have to worry about low bridges, we have to worry about tight turns, there's
a lot of stuff to worry about.
Now we learned last time that it would be handy to have the information on the reservation
itself, whether or not it was prepaid or if a deposit was paid, whether it would accept
credit cards or if a check was required.
Now it may seem odd in this part of the 21st century, but there were several parks that
only took cash or checks.
No credit cards accepted.
Getting the time to compile all of this into a book ahead of time really makes things
less stressful on travel days because everything you need to know is right at your fingertips.
Now I started by exporting the whole trip from RV Trip Wizard as an Excel file, then print
out the maps, then print out the email confirmations where there were any.
Some of those came with advice on the best route to the park once you were close, which
is handy.
There were a couple of places that said, don't pay attention to what Google says, this
is the way you really want to come, good information.
So with all of these, the book came together and planning for the trip was pretty much done.
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