The map page is working now.  We (the we that means quoderat by far) have been researching places to visit for months, saving off descriptions and gps coordinates, hunting for parking areas and trail heads with street view and satellite. (How did anyone travel before Google?)

We’ve focused on the outer thirds of the country. There are over 8,800 points now. We’re using a clustering library for the actual map, but below is a screen shot without the clustering. You can see the mountain ranges in the density of the points.

Here is a topo map scaled down from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission for comparison.

A trip that is measured in months seems like such a long time, surely there must be time for everything, but there is so much to see. We always intended to collect more points than we’d actually end up visiting to give us flexibility, but as we’re starting to make reservations, we’re beginning to have to make those choices of what to leave out in order to keep a pace that balances getting to see new places and staying long enough to experience them.

It takes about 5 hours to fly across the US, which is a long time to be strapped into a cramped and poorly padded domestic economy seat.  It takes 7 days to drive the southern route from Seattle to Tampa, leaving time for sleeping and such and 8 hours of driving each day.  You see a lot more of the country driving than from a plane window, but mostly what you see is the other cars on the freeway.

We would like to see the rest of the countryside, the forests and mountains and shorelines, and the resident birds and bugs and frogs and snakes and such.

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.