hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3690.txt

Episode: 3690
Title: HPR3690: Planning the Trip
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3690/hpr3690.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:08:52

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,690 for Friday the 23rd of September 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Planning the Trip.
It is part of the series Travel.
It is hosted by Aoka and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Taking Our Revised Plant to Completion.
Hello, this is Aoka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
of Hacker Public Radio.
Yes, indeed.
I'm continuing with the series on my RV trip and we've been focusing on the planning
and I'm going to do some more of that today.
Where we left off, we were looking at RV trip wizard and you could just do it one day
at a time.
And that's certainly feasible.
What RV trip wizard doesn't seem to do or at least I haven't found out how to do it yet
is see the whole trip and then fill in details.
It appears to be built on the idea of adding stops one at a time.
For us, we want to nail down the destination stop first, then commit to the daily trips
and stops to get there.
Every trip wizard does let you put in a starting date so I can see a good way to do that part.
But first I want to see in general what this trip looks like.
And for that, I'm going back to Google Maps.
I put in our park in Parampas the destination with our home as the beginning and got directions.
Google will always give you the fastest route as the preferred option.
But we are more concerned with not getting caught up in the mountains while towing a 36-foot
RV.
The preferred route went right through Denver, Colorado, which is the heart of the Rocky
Mountains.
But it offered two alternatives.
And I picked the more southern route, which goes through Oklahoma and New Mexico.
There are mountains in the Albuquerque area, but they're less scary than the Colorado
Rocky Mountains.
Now I can see the whole trip in the big picture.
The first part matches up with what we did in RV Trip Wizard and has us on Interstate 70
as far as St. Louis.
Then we get on Interstate 44 for the next leg.
Interstates are generally very safe for a large RV, so this is good.
So far, I have never run into an excessively low bridge on an Interstate, excessively low
being anything we can't go through.
So we measure ours as being 13-feet-two inches or approximately four meters.
Going back to RV Trip Wizard then, with my planning circle sent it on the park near
Tara Hoat, I can see that the circle goes past St. Louis, so I can follow Interstate 44
into Missouri.
As I zoom in, I see a park in St. Robert, Missouri that is affiliated with both Good Sam and
Passport America.
It also has pull-through sites, which is a plus for making time on the road.
What I mean by this is that it takes time to disconnect and set up the RV and takes more
time to reconnect it to the truck the next day.
So when we're just trying to make time between two destinations, it's sometimes simpler to
just leave the RV connected to the truck and just pull the whole thing in.
And then the next day all we have to do is disconnect the water and electric and hit the road.
So this park in St. Robert, Missouri looked like a good idea, so I added it to the trip
and it tells me it is 330 miles from the one in Tara Hoat and should take five hours
and 30 minutes.
I then centered the map on this park, zoomed out and got my next planning circle.
Proceeding similarly, I added a stop near Oklahoma City that looked good.
When the RV trip wizard warned me that there was no way to get there without going on
an unpaved road.
So now research is warranted and Google Maps is the way to go.
I went to the RV park in question and looked it up using Street View and the only unpaved
portion is in the park itself and I could see it was nothing to be worried about.
So I kept this site on my trip, re-centred the map and onto the next stop.
That took me into Amarillo, Texas.
Now so far all the stops were just for one night.
The idea was to get out to the southwest and away from the worst of winter.
But the next two stops we extended, first a three night stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico
followed by a three night stop in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Now we may do longer stops in these places on another trip, but this lets us see what
the area has to offer.
And then from Flagstaff, Arizona, we went to our final destination, Perump, Nevada,
where we would stay for two weeks.
So our travel plans has to have us leaving Michigan on December 2nd, doing five days
of travel with one night stops before arriving in Albuquerque and traveling somewhere between
300 and 330 miles per day.
Now with my plan speed of 60 miles an hour, that's just under 100 kilometers per hour and
allowing for rest stops, that should end up being about seven hours of travel per day.
Three nights each in Albuquerque and Flagstaff, then a one day trip to Perump on our trip
was now planned.
But to nail it down, we had to call and make reservations at the parks.
This was a pretty straightforward process for all of the parks except the one in Perump.
And what we ran into there was the fact that our RV was 13 years old, they wanted to
see pictures.
Now we're starting to see more of that in the United States.
Some people have really junky RVs and the park is afraid you're going to pull in there
and it's just going to collapse on the site and look terrible and all of that kind of stuff.
So I took some pictures, I sent it in and they said, oh, now that looks fine and we got
our reservation.
Now if you don't have reservations, you're taking a chance and you don't want to cap
off a seven hour driving day by having to look around for a place to stay.
So I think it's a good idea to have those reservations.
So with our reservation at Perump, we're now looking at what is going to be a two week
stay and we're going to have a chance to visit some of the parks in the area, particularly
Death Valley.
So we did enough research to know that there's things to do in that area.
Then what?
Well, looking at the map from Perump, you either go into Southern California or back
down to Arizona.
The further west you go, the further east you're going to have to travel when you turn around.
So we decided we didn't want to go into Southern California.
Also it was more likely to be crowded there than some of the other places.
So we went down to Arizona.
Now at this point, we're no longer looking at long driving days for the most part until
it's time to return home and that's a good thing.
Those days are tiring and in retrospect, now that we've done the trip, you know, we
were talking about 300 or a little over 300 miles per day.
We're going to take that down, I think, in the future to maybe 250 and see if that's
a little better because some of those days we're just kind of brutal and particularly when
you have to do three or four of them back to back.
We're looking at ways with our experience now of saying we can do better.
So what can we do that south of Perump and Arizona?
Well, you know, there's a number of things.
We could do the Grand Canyon.
We went to the Grand Canyon a few years ago when we took that trip with our niece and we
wanted to see some other things.
So we looked at Lake Havasu City which is the home to the London Bridge and yes, that's
really the London Bridge.
The city of London was going to tear it down so a businessman in Arizona bought it, shipped
it to Arizona and reassembled it here.
Well, we decided one week was plenty for this location.
Then we decided to go to Ajo, Arizona which is conveniently situated near the Oregon
Pipe National Monument and the Cabezza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.
We'd stay here for one more week.
Then for a longer stay, we booked a month at a park in Denson, Arizona just southeast
of Tucson.
This puts us in the right place for the Solaro National Park and the Coronado National Forest
plus everything in Tucson and the surrounding area.
Now one thing worth noting is that many RV parks offer lower rates for month long stays.
When I first called this park in Denson, I was looking for two weeks but the helpful person
who took my call explained that by staying for a month, we'd actually end up paying less
than we would pay for two weeks.
Being near Tucson means there will be plenty to do there.
So of course I booked a month and saved several hundred dollars.
Then our next stop was would be Clifton, Arizona for nine months where we're in the vicinity
of the San Francisco River and the Apache National Forest.
And there we headed to, we would head to Silver City, New Mexico, near the Pinos Altos,
a ghost town.
There was once a mining site and was reputed to be haunted and it's also near the
Hila National Forest.
We stayed there for eight nights before moving on to Anthony, New Mexico and that's at
the point where New Mexico, Texas and the country of Mexico all meet.
Which is the site of the Igear Springs National Recreation Area, about one hour from the
White Sands National Park and the San André National Wildlife Refuge.
So we planned fifteen nights there before going into Texas to visit the Big Bend National
Park and we planned to stay there for eleven nights.
Now this park is along the Rio Grande which forms the border between Texas and Mexico and
the park gets its name from the fact that the river does make a big bend there.
Finally on March 25th, 2022 we would start our return trip home.
The process here is very similar to the trip out and in fact most of the parks that we
would stay in would be the same coming and going.
If we don't like a park on the way out we can cancel this day on the return trip and
book something else but without any more information than we have it is simpler to just run that
in reverse.
The return trip will involve four one night stops before we arrive back in Michigan and
by then fingers crossed the winter should be over and once we have all the stops on paper
of course we call to make reservations at each stop.
One thing to keep in mind is that none of this is set in stone.
If we get to a park and hate it we can always go somewhere else.
When you are in an RV your home is on wheels and can go wherever you want to take it.
The worst case scenario is that you lose a few bucks but I think the places we picked
out are going to be fine or I wouldn't have picked them to begin with.
We completed all the planning on November 4th of 21 and our plans call for us to leave
on December 2nd of 21.
The rest of the preparation consists of purchasing supplies of things we need for the trip.
We put in new smoke detectors and new carbon monoxide detectors, head the RV inspected
and maintained by General RV, got new tires for the truck and so on.
Now it's just a matter of waiting a few weeks.
So this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio signing off and is always encouraging you to
support free software.
Bye bye.
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