Not Enough Days

[kevin_standlee]

I've been sketching out our drive from Fernley to Kansas City. It's personally inconvenient to me that Worldcon runs Wednesday-Sunday this year. It means having to really stretch and drive hard by our standards on the eastbound run, as we'll only have four nights to travel the roughly 1600 miles in order to arrive in KC on Tuesday night, when our hotel reservation starts. Now I know some folks don't consider 400 miles/day much of a stretch, but we'd like to be able to stop and look at things along the way. We have considerably more leeway going back home, inasmuch as I have the entire two weeks off and thus six nights to drive home. If Worldcon were on the increasingly-less-traditional dates, we'd have five days each direction.

An additional constraint is trying to schedule around where there are Holiday Inn Express hotels, inasmuch as I intend on using a lot of hotel points and staying on them as often as possible, and using the amenities. For example, I would expect that we would do laundry on the final road night before heading in to KC and on the first or second night out of KC on the way home. Also, we need to consider how early I can get off work on the Friday at the start of the trip and how far we can make it across Nevada. I-80 is a long, fast (legally so), relatively boring highway with relatively little to stop and see that we haven't already done on previous trips. Ideally we'd get all the way to Wendover if possible, but we'll settle for Elko if we must. What we won't do is stop in Wells again, thanks to a bad experience on a previous trip.

In any event, I have a draft outbound plan in place, and Lisa will need to review it and give me feedback. She has more experience of these long cross-country trips than I do.

Comments

[billroper]

Good luck with the trip. I've made that drive across Nevada...

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

This will be our fourth trip that direction together. Lisa has driven it alone many more times. We're currently considering return trips that come back by a different route, roughly along US-50.

[billroper]

As I recall, I-70 is pretty impressive and takes you by Arches National Park in Utah. (Checks Google.) Yup, memory still serves.

We were in Green River ahead of the last L.A. Worldcon when I posted this on free Wi-Fi from the hatch of our minivan full of CDs when we stopped to buy gas. I'd scrawled it on the back of a hotel receipt when I couldn't sleep earlier that morning in Grand Junction. :)

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

I might have considered driving from Albuquerque, but Tara isn't fond of long drives. I know that Albuquerque to Kansas City can be done in one shot - I've done it (as a passenger).

In 1984, our church youth group did their (at the time) annual summer work trip to a church in the inner city of Kansas City. (Aside, as the church was both a Presbyterian and a Methodist church, Randy Smith was well aware of this church when I mentioned it to him during Anticipation). We left Albuquerque in fairly full van about midnight, and got to KC mid afternoon - probably two or three hours later than we would have if we hadn't lost the tread on one of the tires with the jack buried in the trailer (the new youth pastor wasn't happy to find out that the church had been saving money by buying retread tires for the van).

On the other hand, flying will make for a slightly less long day.

[delosharriman]

I'm just trying to dissuade my mother from a plan involving a family vacation in Bar Harbour, Maine, and driving both directions.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

I try to keep us to 4-500 miles a day. It is just more relaxing. We're going to Mythcon in San Antonio before Worldcon. Then on the way back, we're stopping in Albuquerque, so I went and looked and bought memberships in Bubonicon, conveniently the weekend after Worldcon this year. ;)
It's going to be a con filled trip again this year.