The Beauty of Lies has moved to KirkKittell.com (Subscribe to the RSS feed). This post has been copied to http://kirkkittell.com/2008/04/08/mapped-virginia-to-texas-march-2008/.
28 March 2008 was my last day at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Sterling, Virginia; 31 March 2008 was my first day at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in Houston, Texas.
For those of you keeping score at home, the shortest distance between the two is approximately 2200 km (1400 miles). The chosen route, which took me through Columbus, Ohio to visit an old roommate and San Antonio, Texas to drop my girlfriend off at home -- she was wonderful enough to be cramped in the same car cabin as me for three days, wow -- was approximately 3200 km (2000 miles). As my parents used to say: "no rest for the wicked." (Or was that "weary?" The former is accurate enough.)
Generally speaking, the trip could be divided into two parts: (1) rain; (2) no rain. (1) > (2). I think it started raining outside Nashville and stopped... well, for a while in Texas, but only for a while. It was especially nasty around Nashville -- we're talking sheets of rain, and my first experience with zero visibility caused by a truck ejecting an enormous amount of standing water onto my windshield. So we took refuge in the Best of India Restaurant in Nashville for a while.
Megha proved once again that she's sharper than me by planning, on the fly, an alternate route from Texarkana to San Antonio. I was going to take I-30W to Dallas, then I-35 to San Antonio. Of course, this will get you there, but she saw that you could go diagonally from Texarkana via TX-155 to Palestine then US-79 to Austin. Not only did this cut off quite a few miles, it was much more scenic, I presume, than the standard side-of-the-road interstate fare. Also, it was her first time seeing oil rigs; for shame, to think she's been a Texan for nearly a year without seeing an oil rig :-)
Again, in the spirit of TMI (too much information) and capturing my prolific and hopefully-soon-to-be-a-thing-of-the-past road trips -- this ain't no Duluoz legend -- around the great contiguous US, I present to you another map. This trip from Virginia to Texas is detailed in a Google Earth .kmz file on my wiki. It is mostly complete now with a few photos from the trip, plus placemarks and paths, but I recommend -- as always -- that you download the network link file if you're a Google Earth user. Add that to your "My Places" and the trip will be updated anytime I update the static files on my server.
A version of the trip is displayed below. If you want to see the photos, click the camera icons. Want to see a larger version of the map? OK, go here.
If you just want to see the photos, go to my albums on Picasa, Flickr, or Panoramio.
Final note: it would be most excellent if you would post a comment here, -- or if you are a Flickr/Picasa/Panoramio user, there. It's your world, I'm just driving around it.
