Episode: 3650
Title: HPR3650: Major Destinations
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3650/hpr3650.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:49:29

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,650 for Friday the 29th of July 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Major Destinations.
It is part of the series Travel.
It is hosted by Aoka, and is about 15 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
It is about the plan around major destinations and using memberships to get discounted
stays.
Hello, this is Aoka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode
in our travel series.
And we're continuing right now with going through the whole planning process because some
of the things that we did, you know, it might be suggestions that you would find useful.
And so what I want to talk about today is major destinations.
When you know when you're planning a long trip and we're planning like three months,
three and a half months, you know, kind of a thing, you have to have some major destinations
that kind of anchor the trip.
And it doesn't mean those are the only things you're going to do, but they're sort of the
goal posts you want to set in to say these are three or four things I want to make sure
I do.
Now we were planning a trip around going to NASA Visitor Centers.
That becomes the major destinations that we're looking at.
Seeing all of them on this trip just was not going to be feasible for us.
Some are more important and worthy of a visit.
We first dropped the California locations because we thought that was further than we wanted
to travel.
Now a good rule is not to drive more than 300 miles in a day when towing a large RV.
It is more strenuous driving that and towing it than just driving a car and you should not
drive very fast.
We planned a drive at around 60 miles per hour for increased safety.
So 300 miles would mean five hours of driving.
Then you have rest stops and when you get to where you'll spend the night, you need to
set up the RV which takes time.
When you get ready to leave you have to take down everything which also takes time.
So this becomes a parameter in your planning.
You may find that some of your major destinations are more than one day's drive which means
you have to plan stopping points along the way as well.
But it all begins with setting your major destinations.
So what I did next was to investigate each of the Visitor Centers to make sure I knew
the hours of operation, entry fees, attractions there and anything else useful for planning.
If a particular site does not look interesting it can be skipped.
Now to facilitate doing this and to share all of this with my wife I set up a Google sheet
on a shared Google Drive to record the information and you can see on my website a picture of it
and there'll be a link in the show notes for that.
So it's a spreadsheet of all the NASA locations and the data that I gathered about them including
things like nearby RV parks, nearby attractions, what have you.
Now the three on our definite list were the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the US Space
and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Our idea was to spend at least a week in each location, maybe more if there were other
things to do in that location.
Then we could fill in with other locations when practical.
To reduce the total amount of driving it would make sense to refigured to start in Houston
and then work our way east from there to get to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
So let's see how that would work.
I open my map of NASA sites in the My Maps section in Google Maps and again to get there
first you open Google Maps then go to your places then to Maps and then open the map and
select to open it in My Maps.
Then I click on the pin in the map for the Johnson Space Center and then click for directions.
That's an icon with two arrows, one to the left, the other to the right.
I enter my home address in Michigan and Google gives me a driving route.
This will be a fastest route because that's how Google does these things.
It's a starting point.
Now we have to take in a account.
There are severe limitations to Google Maps and one of the big ones for us which is it does
not take into account height restrictions which is important for towing a large RV.
Ours is just a few inches over 13 feet or approximately 4 meters in height and we don't
want to give it a bad haircut.
There are resources for checking that which need to be used before you nail down anything
and looking at the route I noticed it goes right by Memphis, Tennessee.
Hmm, that's a place we might want to visit for a couple of days.
So that's worth noting is the stopping point.
To add it to the trip just click add destination in the layer box on the left.
Now next I wanted to see the step-by-step directions to get more data and this is where I encountered
what to me looks like a bug but with Google you never know.
I had to close Google Maps and then reopen everything in my Maps to get the option to view
step-by-step directions.
This is in the three dot menu in the layer box.
Opening this told me that the route Google picked would cover around 1,300 miles and take
over 19 hours.
Now, as I said this is not what I want to do in a day.
My objective is to go about 300 miles in a day roughly so to me this looks like a trip
that should take about 4 days.
If we decide to stop in Memphis for a couple of days that makes it a six day trip.
Looking at the map and just eyeballing it, Terahote, Indiana looks to be about a 300-mile
trip.
I did a quick check on that by opening up another instance of Google Maps on the side and
it's a useful thing to do for a lot of these.
It turns out it was 342 miles, it was a little more than the 300, but I have a candidate
for the first stop.
Then Terahote to Memphis turns out to be 390 miles, that's a bit much.
But then I noticed Nashville and from Terahote to Nashville is only 261 miles.
Okay that's starting to look good.
So spend a couple of days in Nashville first then going to Memphis from Nashville is
212 miles and we could spend a couple of days there.
From there Texarkana is 278 miles and from Texarkana to Houston is 290 miles.
So now I have a tentative route that takes about 9 days, only one day is over 300 miles
of driving and that's the first day, not too bad.
And with a couple of stops in Nashville and Memphis the travel is broken up with some
sightseeing.
Now the next step is to plan where we will stay each night.
We have a couple of memberships that can help with this and give us discounted stays.
One is something called Escapee's and another is Passport America.
So I look into what options they have.
Escapee's has an online mapping tool that clearly uses Google Maps and you can either
search near a specific location or put in a route and see what options you get.
I first entered Terrahote and selected within 50 miles.
I got several options but the one closest to our route to be Fallen Rock RV Park and
Campground in Brazil, Indiana.
When I plugged that into my site map it ends up being only 328 miles from our start and
still pretty close to our route.
That makes it a great option.
The other way to use the Escapee's mapping tools to put in a route you want to travel
and then let them suggest possible campsal on the way.
Now I did not see anything around either Nashville or Memphis, however, and checking them
as specific destinations instead of as part of a route confirmed that there was nothing
there.
These does have some parks but they're not the biggest nationwide chain so that's not
a complete surprise.
So I moved on to Passport America.
Okay now just a side note on side maps.
My main planning maps are in the My Maps section of Google Maps but sometimes you just need
to check something quickly.
The best way to do that is open a fresh instance of Google Maps and check a route, see how
long it is, etc.
Now back to Passport America.
They have a lot more options.
The directory here is a printed book arranged by State and Province.
States for the U.S. provinces for Canada, that's what it covers.
Going to the Tennessee section I see that Spring Creek Campground is not too far from Nashville
and Big Buck Resort is not too far from Memphis.
Now the point of looking through these places is that I can get discounts.
There are limitations however.
Sometimes discounts are not available when demand is very high and often weekends are
not discounted because they will fill the slots with customers paying the full amount.
Now there are other options like parks, state parks, national parks, even local parks.
And there are Army Corps of Engineer Sites.
These can be even cheaper, sometimes even free.
But the difference generally is that you don't get the full hookups of electricity, water
and sewer.
And we've got enough to deal with on this trip that you're thinking, okay, I don't want
to get into all of that right now.
There are also areas on federal lands where anyone can camp, subject to a few restrictions
for free.
These include Bureau of Land Management lands, some national forests, etc.
They may restrict you to certain areas and the general rule is that you cannot stay in
any one area for more than 14 days.
These never have any amenities other than nature.
So if you want to be out in the wilderness, that's great.
You have to carry your own water, you have to make your own electricity, that's the nature
of the beast.
Now one problem with that is that the vast majority of these lands, BLM and national lands,
is that they're in the western part of the United States.
Now since we're headed west, that's not necessarily a problem.
But if you were wanting to do sightseeing in the eastern U.S., you'd discover there's
very little there in the way of free national land.
So the planning process proceeds by slotting in stops along the way as we have outlined.
Work out how far you want to drive, find some likely overnight stops, etc.
The next step is to check the tentative route.
Google gives you for any possible problems.
There are several ways to do this.
Since there are apps you can use, there is a site called RV Life, it's a membership site.
You have to pay to be a member, include something called the RV Trip Wizard, which is a very,
very nice planning tool.
You can put in your RV's height and weight, so it can help you to plan a safe route.
Now an annual subscription to RV Life runs $49, I got it in a discount because one of
the YouTube channels I follow got a discount for us.
Then there are printed resources like Truckers Map Books that can do something similar.
We ordered one of those through Amazon.
And we use that to just double check, first we used the RV Trip Wizard, and then just
to assure ourselves we use the Truckers book to check the route and just make sure that
there were no low bridges or obstacles like that, and everything checked out.
Now however you do it, don't leave this step out.
You could do something like totally destroy your RV if you run into a low bridge.
And even if you see it and stop in time, trying to back out could take a long time and
make for a very bad day.
Now the last step is to call the parks and make reservations.
Some people just like to hit the road and take their chances, but that does not always
work out well.
There are certain parking lots you can stay in overnight, but this has problems and they
are starting to disappear.
For a long time Walmart was a place where you could park overnight.
What has happened is a number of the Walmart stores are getting rid of it and many municipal
jurisdictions have ordinances that prohibit overnight parking, even if Walmart was willing
to let you do it.
It's a disappearing resource.
If you understand how to do what is called dry camping or boondocking, there's lots
of ways to do it.
But on this trip we decided we've got enough dealing with learning all of the ins and
outs of RVing.
And the other thing is I need to wear a CPAP machine when I sleep and that might mean
more electricity than I can get from a battery.
And with the discounts, we really had no problem paying for our nights in the RV campground
and so that's how we did it.
And so this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off and is always encouraging you
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