Planning a route...

Road stories, questions about driving the B190, lessons learned
Post Reply
User avatar
skater
Site Admin
Posts: 2570
Joined: Thu Mar 08, 2007 1:00 am
B190 Year: 1991
WBCCI: 13270
Location: Annapolis, MD

Planning a route...

Post by skater »

So, I'm planning the trip to Indianapolis this summer, and I have two primary options for the route I'm taking to get to my stopover point on the way, which is here, if you're curious. I'm coming from the DC area.

The first route is I-70 to I-68, to I-79 north.

The second is the ole' standby, I-70 all the way to the campground, via the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

The turnpike can get busy, so I was trying to figure out whether I-68 would be a better route or not. I drove out I-68 several years ago, but I was in a car and it was before I was even thinking of buying the B-van, so I didn't pay close attention to the hills like I would now.

I thought the hills on the turnpike route would be better, but I didn't have an objective, easy way to tell. I'll show the results of my analysis first:

(You may have to click on it to get it full size.)
Image

I did this with the help of Google Earth plus a couple other webpages and writing some of my own code. The graph you see was created using the GNU Plotutils package.

To answer my original question: as you can see, it looks like the two routes are mostly equivalent in terms of hills, but I think I-68 has a couple extra. :)

What do you think? This would be useful for anyone, really - hikers, cyclists, travelers, etc.
1991 Airstream B190 - bought, 2005; sold, 2011; bought 2017
1995 Airstream Excella 30' trailer

WBCCI #13270, Washington, DC Unit
Post Reply