Complex Numbers

Road Trip!

It’s summer here in the US, the perfect season for a road trip! In your blog today, plan your ideal road trip. Where would you go and who would you go with?

This is something I do fairly regularly.

For anyone just tuning in, I've documented some of my road trips on my offsite blog.  

My parameters vary. I've said this before, but the first time I did this, I got it in my head to travel from the easternmost point in the continental US (Lubec, Maine) to the westernmost point (an empty spit of land on the coast of Washington State). One time, I just picked three destinations at random - more on the random thing later. Whatever the route, my ideal road trip stays off of interstates, meanders somewhat, and gives me plenty of time to see the sights.

For various reasons - perhaps I just like to live on the edge - I tend to travel in late fall and winter, not summer. The obvious hazard is that sometimes it snows. One time, I got caught up in a blizzard that stretched all the way across New Mexico from the Arizona border to Amarillo, Texas. That time, I stayed on an interstate. On another notable occasion, I nearly got stuck in an 8 foot drift in Vermont. Fortunately, I was near Ben & Jerry's at the time. Also fortunately, "nearly" means "didn't."

The not-so-obvious hazards are that more places are closed, especially in the northern states, and some roads are seasonally barricaded.

There used to be a website that emulated a dart board thrown at a map. You set parameters and it picked a random destination within those parameters. Sometimes, the spot would be in the ocean, or the middle of a lake, or, in one memorable case, a place in the middle of Nevada, far from any highway, with a lot of guys with guns standing around. But usually, you can just see which points are invalid, and try again. Unfortunately, that site no longer functions, because of changes Google made to Maps.

Sometimes, Google pisses me off. Not enough to swap my Android for an Apple, though.

The other issue with random destinations on that scale is that the code isn't always transparent. All other things being equal, you can't just return a random set of latitude and longitude coordinates and call it truly random; those points aren't evenly distributed. There's a notable increase in density of possible targets the further north you go, as the longitude lines converge. I don't like that. I want the same chance at every spot.

The last time I picked a random destination, it was via a site that returns random ZIP codes in the US. Ended up in a suburb of Boston that time.

But the question was not about my past adventures, but about my ideal road trip. So let me tell you about my ideal road trip.

At last count, there were nearly 6500 craft breweries in the United States. The vast majority of these are local microbreweries. A few are regional. Even fewer are set up to produce the kind of volume it takes to ship nationwide. And my dream is to visit every one of them.

This is not easy, especially since it becomes a Sisyphean task: every week, on average, we gain two craft breweries and lose one. Approximately. So even if I could visit all of them, some would be gone by the time I got to them, and others would spring up in my wake and I'd be forced to turn around and go back to places I've already been. And that's not even counting the simple math that even if I visited ten of them each day, it would take nearly two years. Possibly more, since some are open on different days than others. My personal record is 12 microbreweries in one day, and that was in Asheville, NC, which has more microbreweries than hot yoga studios - and that's saying something.

But... everyone needs a goal in life, and this is mine.

The biggest problem is this: I'm not just visiting to visit; I want to sample their wares. While most samples are small and have little effect, visiting more than one or two in a day makes it so I can't legally drive to the next one. So what I need is a full-time designated driver. This is difficult, because very few people like me enough to hang out with me for that long, and those few who do would want to participate in the goal, thus negating their usefulness as a DD.

This answers the other part of the prompt: who would go with me? It's not like I can advertise on Craigslist, or as I like to call it, Scamlist. I need a friend who has nothing better to do. I'm even willing to pay them.

Self-driving cars can't get here fast enough, as far as I'm concerned.

Then there's the problem of lodging. I don't trust AirBnB worth a damn, and motels get expensive; these expenses add up. Cheaper in the long run to get an RV. But then you run into another problem: Any RV big enough to house two people comfortably can't find parking at most destinations, while any RV small enough to fit into standard parking spaces will lead to personality clashes.

Meanwhile, I'll just keep doing what I'm doing, which is visiting breweries whenever I can, using Uber or Lyft to get me there from a central location.

But I can't help thinking that there's gotta be a way...