if you spend enough time on the internet, you end up craving more human contact, or at least the chance to get out into the real world a bit. At least that is where I found myself earlier this month... after four intense years online, i packed up my car and decided to criss cross the country on the nation's two-lane highways. Last time I drove across country, email was just a dream for most people and planning a trip meant lots of phone calls and maps. This time, I enlisted the help of the internet to get the job done and once again I have managed to actually find a way to use the world wide web for something practical.
My first stop was to a site called Mapquest, which is just www-dot-mapquest-dot-com there I could plug in any two points and find a good route between them... in my case Boston and Berkeley California. MapQuest is a great tool and was one of the first map sites online. You can even put in street addresses.
But what I really longed for was a web site that would let me put in a bunch of cities and have the computer draw up a detailed itenerary for me. I didn't expect that such a site would exist, but the fine folks at Lucent Technologies have developed something pretty darn close. www.mapsOnUs-dot-com has a great system that allows you to put in upto 7 stopping points they call markers, and lets you calculate directions based on either favoring or avoiding major roads. This was a great way to find those lonely highways with the great diners.
MapsOnUs has a few flaws. In my case, 7 stopping points wasn't enough, so it was a little annoying to have to make multiple maps for the complete trip across the states. The directions MapsOnUs provided were pretty good, although at times the site will tell you to get off the highway one exit and get back on the next for no apparent reason. As a result, you really have to reality check the directions you get from MapsOnUs. Finally, MapsOnUs only allows limited sharing of the maps with other people -- I would like to be able to publish my itinerary for any guest to see.
I used to call Triple-A for this kind of service, and to be honest that's still the best way to get detailed well- marked maps for journeys to strange lands, but doing it online allows for detours along the way. Plus MapsOnUs is just plain fun.
By the way, almost all of the major hotel chains are online these days and most allow you to book rooms, but not really knowing where i would be stopping each day, I didn't try to do this.
Once I was on the road, I used my handheld computer, the Apple MessagePad 2000 -- also known as a Newton -- to keep in touch with friends via email, look at web sites for some of the major parks, and adjust my MapsOnUs route. A lot of jokes have been made about the early Newtons, but the new 2000 is the perfect road companion, weighing in at just over a pound and able to do email, web surfing and even show you exactly where you are with an optional Geo-Positioning Satellite system. I didn't plan on getting so lost that I need my position pin-pointed to the nearest meter. Not only did I do all of my internet- related stuff on this little palm-top computer, I also tracked my expenses and bank account, logged into CompuServe, and wrote this commentary as well!
The only real problem in doing all of this came in trying to hook up to the internet from hotel rooms. In major cities this isn't a problem, but I was headed through mostly rural parts of the country. Away from big towns, the quality of the phones lines was noticeably poorer. When you can hear far-away voices or buzzing sounds on your phone, it makes it very difficult to connect to online services. Called "dirty phones lines" this problem caused me more headaches than anything else on the road. If I learned one thing about the online world during my travels, its that the entire mid- section of the country is simply not technologically ready for high speed internet access via their phone lines.
In the end, I still relied on an old fashioned book -- called Road Trip USA -- the entire book is online at www.moon.com. The web site is great, but when you need a quick detour along an old highway, it sure is easier to pull out the book than dial up the web site. If you are hoping to do Route66 or any of America's Two-lane highways this summer, this book has great and ireverant information about the country's small town diversions.
I could easily have taken a digital camera with me, uploaded the images to a web site and taken everyone along, but I'm not sure Jack Kerouac would have approved. After all, trips like these are about discovering this great country -- and yourself -- not about testing the limits of today's technology.
URLs for the wesun web site: