This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,670 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 Aulka 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 Aulka.
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 and what I want to do today is talk about what happens
when your plans change, no matter how well you plan things, life happens while you're
making other plans.
You have to be flexible.
As we are planning our trip, we were planning it in the summer of 2021 and we noticed a big
problem.
Two top destinations are 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 and 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?
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.
The Michigan winters do tend to get kind of cold to say the least and I had made my wife
a promise that hey when we retire will 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.
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 the previous episode when we took
our niece along and visited the Grand Canyon and some of the Utah parks before going into
Colorado.
I'm 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 webpage which has a picture of the
sheet that we did and you can take a look at it and at least 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, highest 59, the lowest 28, the February, highest 66
and the lowest 33, March, highest 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, first thing we noticed is that the Utah parks are all pretty cold.
Zion, Bryce, and Moab were 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
shirts leave weather anywhere. Bryce Canyon is even colder and so on. So, decided that, you know,
maybe Utah is not a place to go in the winter.
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,
there are 3 kilometers above sea level. And Utah does have a reputation for winter sports.
It hosted the winter Olympics in 2002 and it slated the host them again in 2030.
So, that's probably not a good option here. Three other places in New Mexico are in the mountains
and are fairly cold. Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Tows.
They're in northern New Mexico and they're in the Rocky Mountains, basically.
But last cruisest, 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 and Arizona has an average high-end January of 71 degrees, equivalent 22 Celsius.
And most of the rest of Arizona looks good with the exception of flag stuff, which is in the mountains.
Again, elevation is something you have to take in what count on these things.
Southern California looks pretty temperate for winter temperatures.
San Diego, January high of 66, Los Angeles, January high of 68, Death Valley, January high of 67.
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 a teen or above in Celsius.
Often interesting possibility. I say, you know, Dev 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, you know, it can be shirt sleeves whether 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
Parampnavada, 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 didn't example of how to plan to trip just using rural 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
wait limitations. Hight is the biggest one. And at my RV is 13 foot or about four 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 websites 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 link in the show notes, log in and got to work. You've got a three-paying 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. 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 unpaid 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,
I freight-liner 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, in the center, pain 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 in the Canada was not the objective. It still smells nice now.
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 us. There are icons of RV parks.
And if you zoom in, even more will appear. And it can get confusing, but in the right pain,
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 pain, 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. Now, RV life also has a campground reviews app, which I think is the source of this.
So, it is other campers evaluating each park. Park features. Our pets allowed is their access
for big rigs. ours is considered a big rig. Hookups amenities such as restrooms, laundry rooms,
showers, pricing, recreation. 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. At any time, you can change these settings. So, when you get to the first long stop,
where you'll 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,
Tara Hote Indiana was a reasonable one day drive from our home. So, I centered the map on Tara Hote
in zoomed in. Now, you'll know you've 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 option
start to be fewer. I filtered on big rig access and full hookups and saw about a half dozen options
in the Tara Hote area. At this point, you can click on each of the campground icons and get more details.
There is one in Tara Hote 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.
You know, 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 in 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 RIV 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 too. Our mammoth journey to
Perump Nevada and we'll pick this up in the next episode. But for now, this is Huka signing off
and has always encouraging you to support free software. Bye-bye!
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