Vacation Planning

At the end of last summer we had a grand vacation, time in Paris with a guided tour followed by free days.  Memorable for sure.  Expensive.

Had a respite a few hours away this spring, but I need something more elaborate.  I gave my wife a few options with their limitations, mainly the driving that falls to me, irrespective of whether we use my car or a rental.  Not a concern in Paris.  No big problems in Virginia.  The new options of Black Hills, Nova Scotia, and Tennessee will keep me on the road quite a bit.  She opted for Tennessee, divided between Nashville and the Great Smokies, with minor detours to Jack Daniel's and Biltmore.  No planes.  No car rentals.  Just under two months to anticipate.

This should be pretty easy.  Two nights one place, two nights another, one night each to be decided in each direction based on how far I can drive in a day.  Not as easy as it looks.

Travelocity and Son of Travelocity once had an ease that has evaporated.  Pick a city, designate a maximum price, make sure it has Wi-Fi, parking, and pool, then sort by price.  Some snags.  Price puts you a considerable distance from the sights, so sort instead by distance from downtown or preferred sites.  That's better.  Except what you see is not what you get.  Two nights should be the room rate doubled with an increment for taxes.  Unfortunately, not every place you can stay is a hotel.  Sometimes the cost of two days is three to four times the posted room rate.  That's because these travel sites now mingle hotels with other properties that rent short term, the Airbnb's and Vrbo's.  They have a room rate and taxes.  But they have a Property Fee, Reservation Fee, and Cleanup Fee, all a set amount whether you stay for two nights or a week.  For somebody looking for a night or two, that's clutter.  And Travelocity has no mechanism for discarding them from the search.

Nashville has some special considerations.  There are places tourists want to be.  But there is also Vanderbilt University with its world renowned medical center, pro sports, the State Capitol and government activity, Parking is extra, sometimes nominal, often not.  And there are cancellation fee options, sometimes another 20% above the room rate.  Some places near the popular sites have a shuttle.  Hotels are now mostly non-smoking.  Patron reviews reveal loose enforcement by some.  All have Wi-Fi. Not all have room Wi-Fi bundled to the room rate.  And prior patrons comment on unreliable Wi-Fi.

This took some serious effort.  I selected a place, part of a national chain, about a mile from Music.  Paid for non-smoking but braced for what reviewers have conveyed.  If Wi-Fi fails, I can go across the street or to Starbucks.  My stay includes two scheduled treadmill days.  The hotel has a treadmill, though the one in Virginia did not function.  And if all disappoints, I can get into my car, visit a local site, or drive onward to Jack Daniel's.

Judging Distances

Driving to Tennessee at the end of the summer.  Really part of more varied vacation options.  I am so ready for a vacation with hotels, sights to see, and recreation.  Only places I've not been to before considered.  And spousal consent and cooperation essential.  I came up with three options.  She selected Tennessee, a mixture of musical Nashville with my fondness for National Parks and Jack Daniel's.

Sometimes the final outcome lies subordinate to the process of getting there.  My also-rans included The Badlands and Canada's Maritime Provinces.  Transportation needs to each place, particularly driving obligations, determined the final selection. 

South Dakota has no big cities.  It will take a plane to get to one.  I found it gratifying to discover that flights from my home airport to major hubs have very economical fares.  Flights to places not in a hub, whether Rapid City near Mt. Rushmore or Halifax, Nova Scotia, come with a significant markup for convenience.  Long obsolete are the days, and pleasures, of road trip planning with AAA TripTiks.  Anyone with a search engine can find optimal and scenic routes in minutes.

Badlands National Park sits roughly equidistant between Minneapolis and Denver Airports but Mt. Rushmore is far closer to Denver.  And there are two reasonable routes from Denver to South Dakota, either north through Wyoming or an eastern path through the Nebraska panhandle.  The Nebraska route takes less than five hours, the Wyoming route a bit more but offers Devils Tower and a few other unique places en route, while western Nebraska largely traverses ranching land.  Five or six hours doesn't sound like much, considering my concept of where Denver and Minneapolis are generates a much different mental image from where The Badlands are.  Six hours of driving will get me from my home to Boston.  It will allow me to drive significantly beyond Pittsburgh or heading north to about the Thousand Islands Bridge into Canada.  I've done all these, never regretting the effort.  I could go from Denver to Mt. Rushmore easily, one route in each direction, with an extension eastward to the National Park.  Minneapolis to the National Park takes slightly longer, maybe the equivalent drive from home to Ottawa, but returning to Minneapolis from Mt. Rushmore would entail some more serious driving.  Or I could have gone from Denver to South Dakota to Minnesota, but there seems a lot more to see between Denver and Wyoming than in eastern South Dakota and western Minnesota.  It is not just a matter of distance or car time but what opportunities arise to package the tedium of hours on an interstate.

Canada posed more of a challenge to my concept of distance.  I've driven to Niagara Falls, Toronto and Ottawa from my home, each taking most of a day.  I've not driven to Montreal, which seems closer than Ottawa, but really takes an additional hour to drive there.  Getting to Halifax takes about fifteen hours, two days of driving.  My longest personal route has been to St. Louis where I once lived.  Home to Halifax adds two hours to that.  No way am I going to drive that.  Even Boston to Halifax leaves ten hours of driving, still far more than any of my previous driving vacations to Ontario.  And there is a ferry.  Quite a lot of driving to get to Maine, enormous expense, still nearly four hours on the ferry each way.  This is not realistic.  As much as I've fancied every visit I've made to Canada, whether Ontario, Montreal, or Vancouver, Nova Scotia just isn't my best option this summer.  No more than I would be willing to drive a round trip to my old home in St. Louis in one week.

That leaves us with the chosen option, Nashville and Great Smokies National Park, with a few detours to the Biltmore Mansion and other nearby attractions.  It does not require a plane but the drive will span two days in each direction.  Maps estimate twelve hours of driving to Nashville.  The return trip gets fragmented.  Four hours to the park, another two en route home to Asheville, then an additional nine hours home.  Where is Nashville?  It's within five hours of either Atlanta or St. Louis, about an hour and a half from Mammoth Cave.  Yet my mind registers those distances much differently.  St. Louis to Kansas City, a common trip by classmates during my time there is similar, yet one is in-state and the other more foreign in concept.    I have driven from home to Mammoth Cave, which is about the same highway distance as Nashville.  I have driven to Charleston and to Hilton Head.  Each of these lie just a tad closer than Nashville.  Both required an overnight motel stay in each direction.  Figure I can handle about seven hours driving, or roughly home to Niagara Falls, Portland ME, or Columbus OH in different directions.  My sense of distance is not how many miles, but how much time I need to devote the full measure of my attention to traffic safety.  The GPS and online driving calculators correct many of my own misconceptions.  My reasonable ability to cover maybe eight daily hours on the road safely has not changed in a significant way in fifty years of periodic long distance driving.

I've never been to Tennessee.  Much unique experience awaits.  Getting there and back has come into some perspective when compared to other experiences.  My concept of what lies in proximity to what else is often faulty, though now corrected by retrievable information.  Long drive, but worthy destinations and no doubt a few wineries to sample without much diversion from the planned route.