Trip planning with modern tools

In the past, going on a trip was 20% planning and 80% improvisation, but I don’t know about you, for me this process has been turned on its head too! In a next blog you’ll read about our recent trip to California in which we delivered our daughter’s car that we drove last Fall from Washington, DC, to Park City. 

This time our mission is to get it all the way to San Francisco after making a detour to visit spots we had never seen before and return to others we liked a lot. To put that plan together, I began 10 days before departure playing with Google maps to see where we’d go and stay, how long it would take us to get there and build some kind of itinerary. Not to leave any stone unturned,

I checked with AI to get a modicum of approval, which I failed to receive, so it was back several times to the drawing board. In between, I even check for entertainment since we had one stop planned in Las Vegas and wanted to see at least one new National Park, draw a quick budget on a spreadsheet, factoring in the high cost of gasoline as we wouldn’t be driving our electric car for that one-way road trip, and of course bought a pair of return plane ticket to get back home. 

Quite a program, too many confusing choices and a lot of time needed to digest all this and let it mature into a more practical plan! What’s certain is that technology added a lot of time to a complex decision process that was a bit overrated for a simple road trip!