hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3670.txt

Episode: 3670
Title: HPR3670: Changing Plans
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3670/hpr3670.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 03:20:31

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3670 for Friday the 26th of August 2022.
Today's show is entitled Changing Plans.
It is part of the series Travel.
It is hosted by Aoka and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
We look at some potential COVID-19 issues and consider alternatives.
Hello, this is Aoka, welcome you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series about our RV trip.
We're still on the planning stuff.
What I want to do today is talk about what happens when your plans change.
No matter how you plan things, life happens while you're making other plans.
You have to be flexible.
As we were planning our trip, we were planning it in the summer of 2021.
We noticed a big problem.
Our two top destinations were the Kennedy Space Center and the Johnson Space Center,
and they would be packed with people.
And they are in two of the worst states for the Delta variant of COVID-19, Florida in Texas.
That is when we decided to put the NASA trip on hold at this time.
But we have all of the planning we did saved in our Google Drive, so it isn't wasted.
Maybe in 2023, we can try again.
But then what do we do in 2022?
Well, one of the big reasons for planning a winter trip is to get away from the cold winters in Michigan.
We moved out here in 1981, so I could go to graduate school at the University of Michigan.
And Michigan winters do tend to get kind of cold, to say the least.
And I had made my wife a promise that, you know, hey, when we retire, we'll go someplace warmer.
And we had looked at actually moving out of Michigan.
And the more we looked, the more we realized we like where we live for like nine months out of the year.
And then it's the other three months we want to get away.
And that's a very common thing around here.
And so we decided, well, maybe what we need to do is become snowbirds.
So, if we want to get away from the cold in 2022, what do we do?
Now there's basically two ways to get warm.
One is the southwest and the other is Florida.
Now, Varty said, we do not want to go to Florida at this time because we don't think it's safe.
So that left the southwest.
Now we did a trip out that way in 2017, as I mentioned in a previous episode.
When we took our niece along and visited the Grand Canyon and some of the Utah parks before going into Colorado.
Still a lot of stuff we didn't get to see and we'd love to check it out.
So, step one was compile some data on average temperatures.
So we know which places are most likely to be warm in January or February.
And again, a Google sheet was the optimal solution for this.
So, there'll be a link in the show notes to my web page, which has a picture of the sheet that we did.
You can take a look at it and it lists the name of the city, the name of the state, the highs and the lows for January, February and March.
And there's about 20 cities listed here, 20 locations.
Now, getting it was pretty easy.
You just do a search for average January temperature in and then put in the name of the city.
So, for instance, average January temperature in Las Vegas, Nevada.
We put that in.
The Google result that comes back always brings the three months January, February and March.
So, you know, populating this whole spreadsheet probably didn't take much longer than about 25 minutes.
For Las Vegas, for instance, the January high is 59, the lowest 28.
The February high is 66, and the lowest 33.
The March high is 72, and the lowest 39.
Now, these are averages.
You know, your mileage may vary and all of that.
So, again, we did this for places, you know, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, California.
And see, you know, what we had to work with.
Well, the first thing we noticed is that the Utah parks are all pretty cold.
Zion, Bryce and Mollab, where the three we looked at, in January, the high in Zion is 46.
And it gets all the way up to 51 in February and 58 in March.
But, you know, it's not shirt-sleeved weather anywhere.
Bryce Canyon is even colder and so on.
Decided that, you know, maybe Utah is not a place to go in the winter.
Now, that's not surprising, really, because elevation plays a big role.
And all of Utah is on the Colorado Plateau.
So, it probably averages something like 10,000 feet or 3 kilometers above sea level.
And Utah does have a reputation for winter sports.
It hosted the Winter Olympics in 2002 and has slated the host them again in 2030.
So, that's probably not a good option here.
Three of the places in New Mexico are in the mountains and are fairly cold.
Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos.
They're in northern New Mexico and they're in the Rocky Mountains, basically.
But, Las Cruces, which is in the southern part of the state near Mexico,
looks like a decent possibility here.
The best, though, was Arizona and Southern California.
Yuma in Arizona has an average high in January of 71 degrees.
The equivalent of 22 Celsius.
And most of the rest of Arizona looks good with the exception of Flagstaff, which is in the mountains.
Again, elevation is something you have to take into account on these things.
Southern California looks pretty temperate for winter temperatures.
You know, San Diego, January high of 66, Los Angeles, January high of 68, Death Valley, January high of 67.
You know, not too bad.
So, if we want to go there, is there anything we want to see on the way?
Well, this is where that map that we made earlier of all the U.S. national parks and monuments,
and we took a look at places where temperatures were possibly in the 60s or above.
Let's call it 18 or above in Celsius, offered an interesting possibility.
I say, you know, Death Valley, we mentioned, is a national park.
It's well worth visiting, and winter is probably the best possible time to do it.
Because if you go there in the summer, you will die.
It is so hot.
But in the winter, it can be shirt sleeves weather if you pick the right day, or at worst, a very light coat.
Okay.
Well, it does have an RV park, but it's all dry camping no hookups.
But we started looking at things not too far away, and right over the border in Perump, Nevada,
there are several likely RV camps with full hookups.
And then, you know, if we were staying at one of those parks, what other things might we do other than Death Valley?
Well, there are several things. There are some very nice parks in Nevada.
Las Vegas is only about an hour away.
So we set that as our first major stop.
Now, in the previous lesson, I did an example of how to plan a trip just using Google Maps.
This time, I'm going to use RV Trip Wizard.
It's an app that comes bundled in the RV life-paid membership.
Now, I want to get used to it because a lot of the RVers I follow on YouTube and in newsletters recommended highly,
and it does seem like it has a lot of features.
For instance, Google Maps does not have any settings for RVs that let you check height and weight limitations.
High is the biggest one.
And my RV is 13 foot or about 4 meters tall.
And it's not going to survive an encounter with a 12 foot or three and two thirds meters high bridge.
Now, RV Trip Wizard is available as an app for smartphones and tablets, as well as a website.
For ease of use, I am doing the planning on the website.
Since that lets me use my large 32 inch or 81 centimeter diagonal screen.
So, I went to the site at RV Trip Wizard and linked in the show notes, logged in and got to work.
You've got a three-pain view when you're on the website on a computer.
The left pane is the trip details, the middle is the map, and the right is the research pane.
Now, step one is to click the new trip button in the upper left in the trip pane and then enter your starting location,
which for us is our home in Michigan.
Then click on the wrench icon in the trip pane and select trip settings.
Here you can enter the height, length, and weight of your RV, and you can also enter truck information for your tow vehicle.
Then in the routing and driving, you can set how you want your route done.
You can avoid tolls, avoid unpaved roads, and so on.
Then I made settings for how much driving I would allow.
I set mine to 60 miles per hour, that's about 96 kilometers per hour, because speed is how most RVs get into trouble.
I have a good cruise control in this truck and I plan to use it.
I'll just stay in the slow lane as much as possible.
By the way, if I need to pull out and pass, my freight planer truck will do it as long as the grade isn't too bad.
I then set my max driving time each day for five hours and a maximum of 300 miles, which is about 483 kilometers.
Now, telling a big trailer where the big truck is tiring and you need to be alert the whole time.
Bear in mind that these settings are for planning purposes and you can always override them.
But what they will do is draw a circle on the map that you can use for planning.
Now, the center pane is the map display and it looks like they get the mapping from Google.
I just had to zoom out until my planning circle showed up.
It's a flag in the center where we live and from this I can see that we could, for instance, comfortably drive to Toronto in a day.
But going north into Canada was not the objective. Still, it's nice to know.
Instead, I'm looking at Indiana and Kentucky.
The other icons are all, and there's a bunch of them on. It's a crowded map with this.
They're icons of RV parks.
And if you zoom in, even more will appear.
And it can get confusing, but in the right pane, you can refine this.
Click map settings and a pop-up window will open.
In this, I have turned on the button for show campgrounds.
But on the right pane, I can refine this in the Parks tab.
I can narrow this down by park type, such as commercial private parks versus state or national parks.
Park rating.
RV life also has a campground reviews app, which I think is the source of this.
So it does other campers evaluating each park.
Park features.
Our pet's allowed.
Is there access for big rigs?
Are as is considered a big rig.
Hookups.
Amenities, such as restrooms, laundry rooms, showers.
Pricing.
Recreation.
Do they have pools?
Recreation trails.
Maybe.
Shuffle ball or whatever.
Shuffle board.
And finally, brands, clubs and memberships.
Now, you can decide which of these matter to you.
In our case, we mostly want hookups.
We want park features for our big rig access and memberships for the portion of the trip where we're driving every day to get to our remote destination.
Now, at any time, you can change these settings.
So when you get to the first long stop where you will spend a week or two, you can start looking at other factors like rating and price.
The technique is that you zoom in and then select your filters.
As we saw last time, Terahote, Indiana was a reasonable one day drive from our home.
So I centered the map on Terahote and zoomed in.
Now, you'll know you'll have zoomed in enough when you can start adding filters.
They will show in red on the bottom of the right pane.
As I add filters, of course, the options start to be fewer.
I filtered on big rig access and full hookups and saw about a half dozen options in the Terahote area.
At this point, you can click on each of the campground icons and get more details.
There is one in Terahote that is pretty highly rated, but it's also more expensive.
But since we're only going to stay the night and drive off in the morning, we don't need much.
This is just a one night stop on our mammoth journey to get out to the west and get started on the real fun.
Now, there were no passport America campground shown.
There is a good Sam, and we have that membership as well.
I clicked on the icon, then clicked on Add to Trip, and now it's my first stop.
Looking at the trip pane on the left, it is now the number two entry after our starting location.
And it tells me we will drive 311 miles, and it should take 5 hours and 10 minutes of driving.
And a bonus is that the park appears to have a pull-through site available, which means we can pull in and just hook up without removing the truck from the RV.
And that means we can hit the road very quickly in the morning.
Now, at this point, I just clicked on the center button in the campground pop-up window, and now I have a new circle centered on this campground.
So I'm ready to see what the next day is going to take a look at.
So, we can start planning for that day two, our mammoth journey to Perump Nevada, and we'll pick this up in the next episode.
But for now, this is Ahuka signing off, and I was always encouraging you to support FreeSoftware.
Bye-bye!
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