As most of you probably don’t know, I’m writing this post via the free wireless internet provided at my Motel 6 in Mitchell, South Dakota. That’s right – I’m in South Dakota! Just over 24 hours ago, I was in my home town of Northern Virginia.
The Trip
You might be wondering what I’m doing in South Dakota and how I came to be here. Well, I’m on a road trip. I worked a bunch of overtime and used all of my annual leave to take 6 days off from work to have 10 days free to drive from Virginia to Idaho and back. I’ve never been to this part of the country before, and I am very interested in possibly living out west some day, so when my friend Sean suggested we go out to Idaho, I said “sure, let’s do it!”
The trip started Friday, and after an early morning trip to Hertz to pick up the rental car, we spent several hours outfitting the car with all the mobile electronics supporting this expedition, we hit the road. Well, here it is over 1,400 miles and just over a day later, and we’re in Mitchell, South Dakota. We drove straight through the night, only stopping for a total of about 2 hours – once for dinner and once for a nap.
The Nerdery
My friend Sean and are both huge nerds. We’re not too proud to admit it. Therefore, this trip is “supported” by far too much technology. Currently installed in our rental car, we have 3 GPS recievers, a laptop acting as a GPS server (allows the GPS connected to it to be shared out over TCP/IP to pseudo-serial ports on client machines), a webcam mounted on the dash taking a time-lapse video of the entire trip, a APRS (Automatic Position Reporting System) beacon that transmits our position via ham radio every 60 seconds. If the beacon’s signal is recieved by another ham’s station, the information is transfered to the Internet so our friends can see our location in “real time.” We’ve got a police scanner, radar detector, and VHF ham radio to keep tabs on the law and other local events. We’ve got a tablet running navigation software interfaced to the GPS server to give us turn-by-turn directions. And on top of it all, we’ve got a wireless access point which ties all of the equipment together and allows us to use our personal laptops on the “in-car” network seamlessly.
While all of this gear may seem pretty cool, it is really a pain in the ass to deal with during a 5,300 mile road trip – just in case you were wondering.
So Far
The trip has been awesome — I’m tired as hell, but who cares. I’m currently writing this post while sitting in a camp chair in front of my Motel 6 room and drinking a beer several beers. The weather is prefect, the air is fresh and clean, the town is small, the people are friendly, there’s a lot more freedom here, and I’m loving every second of it.
The west is really the best. The worst part so far was driving through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinios. Iowa and Minnesota were not as bad, and offered a lot better scenery. It doesn’t really start getting good until South Dakota, though. If you haven’t driven from the east coast out west, you really can’t appreciate how big this country really is — and I’ve only driven 1,400 miles so far!
I’ll be posting more as the trip progresses. The best is yet to come — Idaho and Wyoming.
Wall to wall and treetop tall, we’ll see ya on the flip side good buddy.
All I can picture is you guys sitting in this tiny sedan, not being able to move because there are TOO MANY WIRES going all over the car.