Prologue - Part III: Knowing what you don't know...

I honestly thought when I first set out to do this trip that I would be able to just pick a destination and hit the road without a care. I really thought I could do that and still adhere to all my other goals like avoiding interstates, finding bizarre roadside attractions, and hitting campgrounds at the end of every night without any pre-planning. For shits-and-giggles I decided to look at an online roadmap, mostly to prove myself right. I was wrong. Even a quick, unscientific look told me I was going to get my ass lost before I even crossed the first state line. My dreams of a Jack Kerouac roadtrip were quickly dashed. Instead I had to resort to using multiple tools to plan out my impending trip.

To get even the most basic idea of how I would get out to Truth or Consequences (T or C) and back I started out using Google Maps. The end result was relatively short direct trip there and back, even when avoiding highways.Trying other online maps like Bing and Mapquest offered me even fewer options. Adding a couple stops like Pensacola, FL and Austin, TX helped out, but it just wasn't taking me on a long enough trip, especially since I had already scheduled two weeks off from work. After playing around with a few stand alone trip makers I ended up settling with Microsoft Streets & Trips. It gave me the most freedom to move routes around, and gave me a lot of options to dictate what types of roads I did and didn't want. What started out as an extremely boring 5 day straight-shot ended up the epic that you see below.

A lot of the route became dictated by the stops I ended up adding after doing a lot of research on the types of things I wanted to see, so this is more or less the final version of the map and not the one that Streets automatically generated at the begining. It's the ease with which the program allowed me to alter routes, order of stops, and insert what I needed that molded the trip as much as what I wanted to see. Next time I'll get into more details about what I want to see and how I discovered the stops that have made the trip what it is.