kevin_standlee | Not Enough Days

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.