America in 100 Days

This post is coming to you from headquarters in Bensalem, Pa., as Joey, Sarah and I have just finished a meeting about our schedule. In doing so, we gave an extra look at our route and the stops we'll be making. A few weeks ago, we realized we'd made the breathtakingly egregious error of omitting Yellowstone National Park from our travels. What a foolish thing to do, we all said in unison. And in adding it to our trip, we put ourselves within such close reach of Idaho and Montana that we'd be idiots not to check them out.
So while Joey tries to upload these places into his clever Excel sheet, here's a look for those of you who don't care to wait. Remember that these dates are tentative, especially the second half, during which we'll be looking for a good festival to enjoy, and which will require us to free up time somewhere. And likewise, we may encounter unforeseeable deterrents and detours, or just need some time to rest our heads.
So don't get too excited, Sioux Falls, SD. We're not married quite yet.

City........Estimated Arrival Date (Length of Stay)
Washington, DC.......................May 31-June 1 (2 days 2 nights)
Baltimore, MD......................................June 2 (1 day 1 night)
Philadelphia, PA..............................June 3-4 (2 days 2 nights) New York City, NY...........................June 5-7 (3 days 3 nights)
South Hadley, MA..................................June 8 (1 day 1 night)
Cape Cod, MA.......................................June 9 (1 day 1 night)
Boston, MA.........................................June 10 (1 day 1 night)
Portland, ME.................................................June 11 (1 day) Lewiston, ME...............................................June 11 (1 night)
Athens, ME.........................................June 12 (1 day 1 night)
Burlington, VT.....................................June 13 (1 day 1 night)
Adirondack Park..................................June 14 (1 day 1 night)
Finger Lakes/Surrounding Cities......June 15-17 (3 days 3 nights)
Buffalo, NY.........................................June 18 (1 day 1 night)
Cleveland, OH.....................................June 19 (1 day 1 night)
Pittsburgh, PA..............................June 20-21 (2 days 2 nights)
Williamsport, PA..................................June 22 (1 day 1 night)
Blue Ridge Parkway.............................June 23 (1 day 1 night)
Asheville, NC......................................June 24 (1 day 1 night)
Great Smoky Mountains..................................June 25 (1 day)
Charlotte, NC................................June 25-26 (1 day 2 nights)
Charleston, SC....................................June 27 (1 day 1 night)
Savannah, GA.....................................June 28 (1 day 1 night)
Jacksonville, FL.............................................June 29 (1 day)
Daytona Beach, FL.......................................June 29 (1 night)
Miami, FL...........................................June 30 (1 day 1 night)
Key West, FL.........................................July 1 (1 day 1 night)
Tampa, FL............................................July 2 (1 day 1 night)
Orlando, FL...........................................July 3 (1 day 1 night) Macon, GA......................................................July 4 (1 day)
Atlanta, GA.......................................July 4-5 (1 day 2 nights)
Birmingham, AL............................................July 6 (1/2 day)
Montgomery, AL............................................July 6 (1/2 day)
Pensacola, FL....................................July 6-7 (1 day 2 nights)
Mobile, AL............................................July 8 (1 day 1 night) New Orleans, LA.............................July 9-11 (3 days 3 nights)
Baton Rouge, LA...................................July 12 (1 day 1 night)
Memphis, TN.......................................July 13 (1 day 1 night)
St. Louis, MO.......................................July 14 (1 day 1 night)
Louisville, KY.......................................July 15 (1 day 1 night) Indianapolis, IN....................................July 16 (1 day 1 night)
Chicago, IL...................................July 17-18 (2 days 2 nights)
Milwaukee, WI.....................................July 19 (1 day 1 night)
Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN......................July 20 (1 day 1 night) 
Detroit Lakes, MN.........................July 21-25 (5 days 4 nights)
Badlands National Park....................July 25-26 (1 day 2 nights)
Sioux Falls, SD...................................July 27 ( 1 day 1 night)
Omaha, NE..........................................July 28 (1 day 1 night)
Lincoln, NE..........................................July 29 (1 day 1 night)
Topeka, KS....................................................July 30 (1 day)
Wichita, KS..................................................July 30 (1 night)
Tulsa, OK......................................................July 31 (1 day)
Dallas, TX...........................July 31-August 2 (2 days 3 nights)
Houston, TX................................August 3-4 (2 days 2 nights)
San Antonio, TX.................................August 5 (1 day 1 night)
Austin, TX........................................August 6 (1 day 1 night) Abilene, TX.................................................August 7 (1 day)
Amarillo, TX..............................................August 7 (1 night)
Colorado Springs, CO..........................August 8 (1 day 1 night)
Denver, CO................................August 9-11 (3 days 3 nights)
Boulder, CO.....................................August 12 (1 day 1 night)
Cheyenne, WY.................................August 13 (1 day 1 night)
Casper, WY...............................................August 14 (1 day)
Billings, MT..............................................August 14 (1 night)
Yellowstone National Park...........August 15-16 (2 days 2 nights)
Idaho Falls, ID............................................August 17 (1 day)
Wasatch-Cache National Forest....................August 17 (1 night)
Salt Lake City, UT.............................August 18 (1 day 1 night)
Canyon Tour............................August 19-21 (3 days 3 nights)
Las Vegas, NV..........................August 22-23 (2 days 2 nights)
Death Valley National Park...........................August 24 (1 day)
San Bernardino, CA...................................August 24 (1 night)
San Diego, CA..........................August 25-26 (2 days 2 nights)
Anaheim, CA....................................August 27 (1 day 1 night)
Los Angeles, CA...............................August 28 (1 day 1 night)
Santa Monica, CA.............................August 29 (1 day 1 night)
Santa Barbara, CA............................August 30 (1 day 1 night)
Santa Cruz, CA...........................................August 31 (1 day)
San Jose, CA............................................August 31 (1 night)
San Francisco, CA.....................September 1-2 (2 days 2 night)
Napa Valley, CA...........................September 3 (1 day 1 night)
Pacific Coastal Highway...........September 4-5 (2 days 2 nights)
Eugene, OR.................................September 6 (1 day 1 night)
Portland, OR.....................................................September 7

Now let's see how long it takes Joey to make a new map.

-Tom Stanley

Sarah, Tom and I are trying to nail down exactly how much time we have and what additional adventures we need to build into our itinerary.  Unfortunately, we don’t have an easy way to edit our timetable.  We can’t, for example conceptualize and discuss what would happen if we added a day in N’Orleans or are running a couple hours late at the Grand Canyon.  Could we end up having to drive through the Rocky Mountains at night?  Would we plan our way into a position where we are visiting a museum when it is closed?  Might we end up finding ourselves in a mad dash at the end or with extra time that we could have spent more productively earlier in the trip.  I certainly don’t know.  Don’t look at me like that.  Neither do you.  Nobody knows.

UNTIL NOW!

I did the best work that I have ever done in Excel today.  I know how excited everyone must be.  I won’t bore you with the details of the formulas as much as I did Sarah.  You can look for yourself if you like.  If you are familiar with conditional formatting in Excel (or want to find out more,) select any colored cell and on the menu bar select Format>Conditional Formatting.  Even though I promised to spare the technical details, I will share some of the more interesting aspects. Below the name of each location, there is a rough visual representation of the length of time we are spending in that particular location, rounded to the nearest third of a day.  By looking at the colors of the times that we are arriving or departing a location, you can judge quickly whether we are leaving or arriving to a city morning, daytime, evening, or night, which are represented by orange, yellow, purple, and gray, respectively.  Longer driving times are also indicated by color changes.  Adding time in one city pushes back the schedule for all the others.

So download it and have a quick look if you like.  I would love to get suggestions on ways to improve the format.  And if anyone would like to use this to plan their own adventure feel free, but if you feel inclined please let me know and tell me about what you are doing.

-Joey Salvucci

p.s. The dates and times currently in the template are very tentative.

triptimeline01-08-09.xls
File Size:	93 kb
File Type:	xls

Download File

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With the New Year and the general passage of time comes an uptick in announcement of events both near and far. As I've mentioned before, one of our top priorities during our little adventure is to find these events, be they single-night concerts, several-day festivals or what have you. Joey insists that we have to go to at least two festivals during the span of our venture, which is something I have a lot of difficulty arguing with.
But as I've mentioned, it's not the easiest task finding festivals that match up perfectly with both our route and our schedule, though both are still subject to very minor changes at this stage in the game. A testament to this comes in the form of Burning Man, a cultural and arts festival in Nevada that has built quite a reputation for itself. This year, Burning Man falls between August 31 and September 7, which just isn't going to fly for us. Our beginning and end dates are, as far as I'm concerned, pretty close to being set in stone, and our end date is about a day after Burning Man ends. We can't exactly cover the entire west coast in one day, y'see.

But we do have some assistance, and that comes in the form of the best festival-finding forum in the free world, courtesy of JamBase.com. JamBase has a festival guide that receives regular updates about events featuring many of the bands that we three travelers are so longing to see, sorted by date and region. It will be with the help of this fantastic beam of digital enlightenment that we will plunder our way to whatever we can find in the way of live music in great locales.
Thanks, Jambase. You're a true friend.

-Tom Stanley

So when we began our planning for this trip, we mapped out the whole trip to last a mere month, 30 or 31 days or whatever it was at first. We took a step back, and made the inevitable decision to expand that to 100 days. But the whole thing was still just for fun.
Obviously this didn't last long, as evidenced by the amount of time we've spent branding our idea and pushing it here on America in 100 Days. At this point in the scheme of things, once we're on the road and we've abandoned our jobs back home, blogging on this trip will become a full-time job for all of us. Joey and Sarah are on board with writing, and both of them were fortunate enough to obtain video cameras during the recent holiday season.
So I put a little thought into what more we could be doing in order to lend our site a little more punch, and help us to heighten our credibility as serious journalists. And this made me think back to an aspiration of mine for some time, that being to sit down with some appropriately noteworthy people and conduct interviews.
There are a number of people with whom I'd love to have a few moments to speak, not only about who they are and what makes them worth the time, but about their travels in life, and what they would send me off to do if they were to direct any part of our itinerary.
It's just a thought for now. But look forward to its matriculation.

-Tom Stanley

The time is ticking onward at a breathtaking pace, as we've got a mere five months remaining before departure day, May 31. And as we get closer, our planning gets a little more detailed, a little more concrete every day. The next time the three of us meet, we'll be nailing down a tentative schedule of when we'll be where, which will weigh in greatly upon what we end up doing in those particular locales.
The new year is also a good time to step up our content on America in 100 Days. As Joey mentioned on New Year's Eve, it's almost standard practice for a site like ours to be updated on a daily basis.
This is not a goal out of our reach by any means. As I replied to Joey, once we're actually on the road, we'll be doing daily, sometimes more than once daily updates about where we are and what we've been seeing. These will come on the form of text posts like the ones we've had thus far, as well as slideshows of photos and, yes, even videos. Moreover, we've seen some recent activity from Joey and Sarah on the creative side, which I'd love to see more of.
For my part, I'm thinking of taking a big leap and forking over some cash for a new laptop. For the time being, all of my posts have been coming to you via someone else's computer - be it Joey's during a planning meeting, my girlfriend Bernadette's while she watches Top Chef, or what have you. I would be getting a lot more done if I had a computer at my side at pretty much all times. Once that expensive step has been taken, you can probably expect a burst of content on the site, often times in smaller, more frequent increments, I'm sure.
But at the same time, don't forget to check out Where We're Going, which continues to grow by leaps and bounds. And as the time progresses and dated events are announced, look forward to our itinerary growing by leaps and bounds.

-Tom Stanley