Episode: 3630
Title: HPR3630: Planning an RV Trip
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3630/hpr3630.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:24:49

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,630 for Friday 1 July 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Planning and RV Trip.
It is part of the series Travel.
It is hosted by Okka, and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, tools and suggestions for planning
a long RV trip.
Hello, this is Ahoca, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio.
And this time we're going to do something a little bit different.
I was chatting with Ken sometime back in, well, it was sometime last 2021, and said
saying that, well, you know, I'm going to be on the road.
I'm not going to be able to do any recording, and, you know, we're going to be taking this
trip.
And Ken said, well, hearing about your trip is something that I think people would like.
So if you find this boring, you can blame Ken.
If you like it, then you can thank me.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to go into how we did it from start to finish, and
works and all, because we made some mistakes, and we did a few things that made us look
stupid, and I will own up to them, because I think that's the best way to do this sort
of thing.
Now, a little background, my wife and I did some traveling early on.
We went to San Francisco in January of 1979, and we got engaged while we were there.
We went to Austria for our honeymoon in late 1979, October as I recall.
Then in 1981, we went to England, because we could stay with Cheryl's aunt and uncle,
who were living just outside of London at the time, a place called St. John's Wood.
And then I went into graduate school at the University of Michigan, and that was the end
of traveling for a while.
You know, grad students do not have a lot of money.
From grad school, I went to being an underpaid assistant professor of economics.
Again, not a whole lot of money.
Eventually, though, my career took a turn, and I wound up as a project manager.
Now, my focus at this point was to keep working and keep the bills paid.
We had bought a house.
I had a mortgage, you know, and all of the adult responsibilities to deal with.
But in 2014, Cheryl told me I should stop talking about someday going to Ireland and just
do it.
If I mentioned, I married really well.
So in 2015, we went with my brother and his wife, and we kind of got to travel bug.
The following year, we took a boat and bike tour through the Netherlands and Belgium.
In 2017, we took a tour out west and brought our niece along.
On this trip, we saw the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park,
and Rocky Mountains National Park.
We discovered that the west has a lot of stuff worth seeing, and it's like, you know,
we need to come back.
Then we began talking about buying an RV to do some more traveling around the country.
We have some friends who started doing that years before, and we thought that looks like
what they're doing is fun.
Then in 2018, we went and rented one for a week in the Traverse City area in Northern
Michigan, and got an idea of what we liked and didn't like.
Now this was an RV that was stationary.
We didn't take it anywhere.
It was on the property, but it was connected to water, and sewer, and electric, and all
of that good stuff.
And you know, we formed some ideas of what we liked and didn't like in our RVs.
Then in May of 2019, Ford, where I worked, decided I was ready to retire.
I wasn't planning the retire at that point.
My initial plan was to work until I was 70 and then retire, and Ford gave me my walking
papers a few months short of my 68th birthday.
But at that point, you know, you're not going to start a new job.
So I just said, okay, fine, I'm retired.
You know, the best thing that ever happened to me, really.
Then to celebrate our 40th anniversary, we took a Ryan River cruise with Viking.
That was a lot of fun.
And then in February of 2020, we got away from the winter cold with the two-week Caribbean
cruise.
Of course, the whole world shut down shortly after we got home.
But by now, we have bought an RV, and you know, we decided we were going to take a trip
over the winter of 2021-2022 to get away from the Michigan cold.
So that's a little background on what we have done before with travel.
And now, you know, I'm going to start by taking you through the planning process because
I think some of this might be of interest.
So in the fall of 2021, we started planning our trip and what we were thinking was we
would leave in December of 2021 or January 2022 and probably come back in about three months.
We bought an RV in a truck and we bought them from those friends of ours that I mentioned
before who had been doing it for a number of years.
This lady's husband had passed away, sadly, and she did not want to deal with the truck
or the big RV that he had always handled.
So we got a very nice deal on that.
The truck is fine.
It's a freight liner sport chassis.
The RV needed a little work.
Something really major.
Some things we didn't seem to get working, but you know, we figured out a lot of that.
One of the things that this trip was about for us was figuring out stuff because we just
we didn't know anything when we set out.
Often, it's, you know, it would be like a button or a switch we haven't figured out yet.
Now we were seeing reports that the campgrounds were completely filled with all of the people
who couldn't travel any other way.
I have to tell you, this was not our experience.
We really, the only place, it was one place that we talked to about getting a spot who
said, oh no, we're all booked.
Every other place that we talked to, it was no problem.
Now, sometimes, I think of one situation where we wanted to extend our stay a little and
it was like, well, we can only give you three more days because we've got someone else
coming in.
It was going to take that spot.
Now, you know, it might be different in summertime, you know, I keep reading stories about all
of the RVs that are being sold and how many people are going RVing, but it was not a problem
for us being out west in the winter.
Now to start learning about planning, I bought a course from a couple of YouTubers who have
a channel.
It used to be called a streaming life, a streaming life, and with apostrophe.
And that was because they had an air stream trailer.
Now they've since bought some land in Arizona and settled down, so they changed the name
of their channel to a dream in life.
You know, they have put together a course, very detailed and good course on how to plan
a trip and the tools you can use.
And I'm going to put a link in the show notes for anyone who is interested in that.
I'm happy to recommend it as good value for money.
I may repeat some things from the course in my discussion, but you should really purchase
this if you want to get the full value.
Now our starting point was looking at a map, and in our case it was Google Maps, which
is also what the course was based on.
And seeing what was due south of us in Michigan, and due south of us eventually gets to Florida.
But Florida is where a lot of East Coast people go in the winter, so it might not be the
best time to go.
But in looking at the route, I noticed Huntsville, Alabama, and told Cheryl I always wanted
to go there.
This is where the space camp is located, and while I'm probably too old to survive that
now, I thought, you know, visiting the facility would be a good idea.
As we discussed it, Cheryl suggested maybe a trip around NASA locations might be a good
idea.
As I've said, I married really well.
Now, of course, the hats and t-shirts I have with NASA and Sigma may have been a clue
to her.
Now step one was where I started a Google map for the trip.
Now to create a map in Google, you click on the hamburger icon in the upper left.
That's the one with three horizontal lines, like a burger inside a bun.
And then you select your places.
Go over to Maps on the left and click on it, and you will see any maps you have created.
And if you haven't created one yet, go to the bottom and click Create Map.
I have several in there already.
The first one I created was for our trip to the Netherlands and Belgium in 2016, and
I made one of our state of Michigan to help with plenty of some trips here.
But something worth pointing out is that there are maps other people have created and
shared, which you can copy into your own maps space.
For instance, I did a search and found a map of U.S. National Parks and National Monuments.
I don't own this map.
I can if I wish copy it into my own collection.
But so far, I've not found a need to do this since the map stays available to me.
The next thing you need to know about Google Maps is that it is organized in layers.
These layers can be viewed individually, or you can view several together, just like
the layers in a graphics program like Gimp.
This lets you put different information on different layers, which can make it easier
to deal with than a single layer that has everything.
I started with a layer that has all of the NASA places a person can tour.
I did a search.
I found a site on the web called Visit NASA, and again link in the show notes, which listed
all of the NASA visitor centers in the United States.
Then in Google Maps, I created a layer called NASA visitor centers, and from the NASA site,
I grabbed the address of each center, entered it into the search box in Google Maps, and
in each case, the map zoomed into the location.
A little pop-up box appeared, and in the bottom of this box was a link that said, plus add
to map.
I did this for all of the visitor centers.
Then I went to a box in the upper left, I've got a picture of this on my website, and
add again, there's a link in the show notes for this.
That box basically is telling me, it's a dialog box about what I've done, what I have
here.
On the top, it gives the name of the map, and the description I gave it when I set it up.
Under that, you can see the layers.
Right now I only have one layer, the one for visitor centers, but I know I'll be adding
more.
To keep the confusion factor down, I want to use different styles for different map buttons.
So first, I make sure I have it set to uniform style, right under the layer name.
That way, all of my visitor centers will have the same style for their map locations.
You can see where it says, all items there.
If you mouse over that, you'll see an icon appear on the right, a paint bucket pouring paint.
Click that, you get your usual selection window, where you can click on a color.
I picked green for no particular reason.
Under that, popular icon shapes, and I picked a circle with a star icon.
But you'll see at the bottom, there's a little button you can click for more icons, there's
at least 100 icons available in categories like shapes, sports and recreation, places,
transportation, crisis, weather, animals.
Having all of these available is a big help in planning a long trip.
So with that, my map now shows the United States with about 14 pins, so to speak.
The icons of a green circle with a white star inside of it.
Now, it probably takes longer to explain all of this than it does actually do it.
So I think it took me about 15 minutes to get all of that stuff in there.
Now another feature of Google Maps is that each layer contains other layers, which are
the views you can have.
This is very useful for planning purposes.
When you go to your places, click on a map, and in the lower left, you will see a square
that says layers.
Mouse over it and a window opens on the left.
To see all of your options, here, click the more button, and that brings up a window where
it's going to say map type and map details.
Now, map details, you can have transit information for public transportation, traffic information,
biking information, street view, some terrain information.
At this point, COVID-19 information was one of the things they had.
I don't know if it's going to stay in there, long-term.
I'm hoping not.
And then the map type, you can have the default map type or you can have the satellite view
or even a globe view.
So how do all these things work transit?
If you are in a new city or plan to visit one, you can see the various kinds of transit
available to you, such as buses or a metro or in the United States, we tend to call
these things subways.
You can get directions and schedules for your transit options.
That's a good thing to know.
If I take the bus somewhere, when is the last bus coming back, I'm going to be handing
to know that.
For the traffic, of course, if you're going to be driving in a new location, check out
the traffic.
You can see the average expected traffic for any specific time in day, which is pretty
handy.
Well, you might want to know that, oh, this always gets really backed up at a certain
time every day and decide I won't travel at that particular time.
Now biking, we both enjoy biking.
I think I mentioned our trip to the Netherlands and Belgium in 2016 was a bike trip, in part,
as we biked from location to location while sleeping and eating on the boat.
We brought our bikes with us on the RV trip.
We prefer to find bike trails that are not sharing the road with cars, because we live
in the United States and there are crazy people here.
It's not like Europe where bikes seem to have the right of way everywhere, or at least
everywhere we've been so far.
So the biking info give you information about bike paths, separate from streets, and that's
useful to know.
Terrain, this is also worth looking at.
For biking, for instance, we'd like to avoid any steep slopes, but it also matters a lot
when towing a heavy RV.
We ended up on our trip cancelling one stop because we realized that the terrain for
getting there was not something we were comfortable doing.
So it does pay to check that out when you're planning.
Now street view, this is important when towing an RV because they're big.
RS is 13 feet or about 4 meters tall, and we really don't want to run into low branches
or other similar obstacles.
Your highways are not usually a problem and the right GPS can root you away from low bridges.
But if someone offers to let you stay on their property, you need to see if you can do
it safely, including making the turn into the driveway without crunching into a tree or
a mailbox.
Street view is great for this.
And the COVID-19 info, yeah, I hope in a few years it won't be necessary.
Now in addition, you can switch from default map view to satellite view or even a 3D globe
view.
I don't see a need for a 3D globe for planning my trip, but it's interesting to know
it's there.
Okay, so we've done a number of things in this.
We've given a little background on the travels that my wife and I have done.
Introduction to Google Map created a first layer with all the NASA visitor centers.
So next we're going to move on to further planning steps.
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