Planning a Trip

We could just ship a pallet full of the things that Chrissy’s niece, Liz, had stored in her mother’s basement before she passed. But doing that would spoil the fun of renting a minivan, loading it up, and driving from Ohio to Los Angeles to spend some quality time with Liz. I also have a couple old friends in LA that I would love to see. 

I thought that I might put my rudimentary knowledge of AI to use in planning the trip. 

My research is not groundbreaking, still, perhaps you can tailor what I’ve done to your own situation. 

ME: “Hey AI, what’s the quickest way to drive from my house to LA?”

AI: “That’s easy moron, take I-80 west to I-15 and turn left”.

ME: Well that was rude, AI.

AI: C’mon idiot, ask me something harder.

ME: Fine. Where would you recommend stopping each night, if I don’t want to drive more than 500 miles per day?

AI: That’s a little better dipwad. Giving me approximate places to bed down along the way.

The fastest way was the northern route. I have driven that way before when I moved my neighbor Kenny to Las Vegas. Except for Utah it’s kind of a boring drive. 

So I asked about the central route through Colorado. It gave me similar good information, and also warned me that I could encounter snow in the highest elevations in early May. 

I then asked about the southern route that would take me through New Mexico and Arizona. I have flown over the Grand Canyon, but have never seen it from the ground, so I asked AI to get me there early in the afternoon on one day, and to schedule a stop in Lake Havasu the following day. Viola, AI planned slightly longer drives early in the trip, in order to give us more time, and shorter drives on the last three days of the trip. 

Making use of an ancient analogue device, also known as a Rand Macnally Road Atlas, I tweaked AI’s plan so that our stops in Missouri and Oklahoma will be just beyond the big cities of St Louis and Oklahoma City. I suspect that AI could have done that for me if I had asked, but I thought I needed to keep my pre-GPS map reading skills intact. And besides, I couldn’t take more of AI’s bullying.

Our plan is to drive a rented van to LA, and fly back home. I picked up a good website for car rentals while reading an old article from the “Spotlight” section. There’s some good stuff in the archives. Autoslash searched everywhere, including Costco and Walmart and found us a great deal on a Chrysler Pacifica minivan. https://blog.autoslash.com/

Maybe AI can help you plan some adventures as well. 

Any tips you can add will be found well taken. You couldn’t be a bigger bully than AI. What does that stand for anyway? Awfully Intimidating?

Happy trails