QTS (Quick Trip South) planning

Well, I FINALLY got approval from my company to work remotely this winter. But with some restrictions:

1. I minimize the amount of time that I am on the road.  I am not quite sure where this one came from, but there it is.  The impact is that the original plan for 4 weeks to get to Florida and 5 weeks to return has shrunk to 2 and 3, respectively.
2. I minimize the amount of time that I am away.  This means that our original plan of leaving in October and returning in May has been squeezed to a Nov 2 departure and an Apr 7 return.  Plus I will return to MA for 4 weeks in the dead of winter.

These restrictions mean that the original QTS has become the Very QTS.  There are going to be some LONG travel days both going south and coming back north.

The general overview of the QTS is:

• Leave Saturday, Nov 2.
• Travel only on weekends – 6 days total travel days.
• Stay a week each in Alexandria, VA, and Savannah, GA.  I will be working both of those weeks.
• Arrive in Ft Myers on Sunday, Nov 17.

Because the Minuteman Campground closes on Oct 20, we need to relocate to another campground that stays open longer.  We have chosen the Normandy Farms Campground in Foxboro, MA – a place that gets spectacularly good reviews and charges spectacularly high rates. But because it stays open longer than Minuteman and opens earlier in the spring, it provides us with a workable option for both the trip south and the trip north. The commute from Foxboro is about the same as the commute from Littleton.

So we are going to leave Minuteman a week earlier than planned – next Saturday, Oct 12 – and mosey down to Rhode Island for one night (to allow us to put that sticker on our map), then mosey up to Foxboro for a 20-night stay. That adds two travel days to the QTS, but they are hardly worth mentioning, being a total distance of less than 100 miles.

So here is the map of the planned QTS, with stops marked:

The QTS route, with stops

Total distance: 1,625 miles over 8 days of travel for just about 200 miles per day on average. But the average is skewed by those first 2 days to Foxboro; the other 6 days will cover over 1,500 miles or over 250 miles per day. The longest hop will be from Alexandria, VA, to Wade, NC: 288 miles.

Besides the weeks in Alexandria and Savannah, we will have overnight stops in Jackson, NJ, Wade, NC, and Ormond Beach, FL. Three more stickers for the map. At the end of the QTS our map will have 23 stickers. Almost halfway to our goal of hitting all 48 in 3 years. We expect to collect 6 more (MS, AL, SC, MD, DE and CT) on the trip north.

Besides the long distances over heavily-travel roads, I am a bit concerned about the weather on this trip. We are, after all, leaving New England in November and large snowfalls in November are not rare. It is also still hurricane season and we will be hugging the Atlantic as we head south.

One other concern: we will be traveling through metropolitan New York City. We have avoided getting anywhere near NYC in the past, but there is just no easy way to avoid it if we want to get that NJ sticker on our map. We intend to hit MD, DE and CT on the return trip, so we will almost certainly have to go the same route, opposite direction, through the city next April. Hopefully it will not be too difficult, but I am sure Jett will be squirming in her seat while we wander through the Bronx and over the Verrazano Narrows bridge. She will probably keep her eyes closed.