Do You Know the Way to San Jose? (thoughts on the TripTik)

We are considering taking a roadtrip to Texas in March or April. My sister lives in the west Texas hill country. If you look at a US map, the navigation looks simple. Drive 1200 miles south on I-35, turn right near Austin , Tx and go 60 miles. Viola! Today Jon went to the AAA website and printed a TripTik. It is 63 map-illustrated pages of the route. . Simple, huh. Jon remembered the days when he drove his dad to Texas for the winter. He remembers inadvertantly deviating from I-35 around Kansas City. He remembers his dad's ire. His dad was a dear, sweet man with a not so endearing temper. "You are wearing out my brakes!," his dad said when Jon found himself going through KC on surface streets instead of around it on the beltway. It was a bit tense. So, Jon printed a TripTik. It will be my job to navigate around KC.

My record for using the TripTik is flawed. Thirty years ago we did a road trip to California with our kids. AAA printed a flip-chart style TripTik for us. It worked fine. Follow the page, when you get to the bottom, turn it over and start at the top. There was only one problem. On the return trip, we had the number of days travel calculated (figure how many miles you must drive per day) to get back just in time for the kids to start school. No slack time. When we got to the bottom of one TripTik page we were entering Yellowstone National Park. The TripTik picked up as we left the park. We did not calculate the time it would actually take to drive through the park. In August, you drive miles and miles through the park following RVs going 20 MPH. Everyone goes slow to see the wildlife. We got behind schedule. We exited the park and had to drive across a northern mountain pass by Red Lodge, Montana. We drove through the mountain pass around 10 or 11:00pm. No guardrails. No street lights. The occasional grazing herd of cows in the road. Ooops. We got to Billings,MT late, slept fast, and continued on in the early am. We had 950miles to cover in the last day if the kids were going to start school on time. We may have exceeded the speed limit in North Dakota.

Wish me luck navigating, or I could just read the signs. I don't think you can lose Texas.