Thursday, 24 September 2009

18th / 31st July – Detailed Route Planning, Part 3

My wife Jackie is American and each year we try to take a family holiday somewhere near Seattle in Washington State. Seattle is where most of Jackie’s family live so it is an obvious location for us to holiday to. This year, 2009, we rented a house at Lake Whatcom, near Bellingham and this gave me an ideal opportunity to do the detailed route planning for a considerable number of States. Being an early riser, I had a good few hours each day on my own, so at about 5.30am each morning, the maps came out for some planning!

One great benefit of doing the planning in the early mornings in the house overlooking the lake was the peace, quiet and sheer tranquillity of the setting. The picture below shows the view from the house we rented.















The only problem was, in order to do the detailed route planning I needed access to the Internet and there was a problem with the Internet service to the house we had rented. This was fixed after a couple of days but to make up for this, the owner of the house took a couple of us for a quick trip in his – wait for it – private plane! Wow, that was fantastic and we flew over the San Juan Islands and landed on a grass strip on one of those islands and took a walk around.





























In the house at Lake Whatcom, I was able to do the detailed planning for the States of Connecticut, New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Iowa. Each State took the equivalent of about a full morning to plan and type up on my spreadsheet. The total amount of miles planned so far is now 4720.

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