Day 9: Hiding from winter

After a roughly a week on the road, I've retreated to East Tennessee to see family, do a little laundry, and hide from the weather. A second cold snap has descended on the eastern US and my choices were clear: head _way_ south, Miami or farther, or find a garage. I'm a big wimp and I don't drive the Lotus in the snow -- at least not with summer tires.

Brrr....

Coming from Charleston, I hit the 10,000 mile mark. It's nothing for a daily driver, but is a lot for a car that I have rarely driven in the past year. It also means I probably have a good idea on how the car will be for the next 100K miles. The Toyota drivetrain is likely to last a long, long time.

A couple days of normality gives me the chance to look at routes for the next couple of weeks of driving. The best multiroute map optimizer I could find was http://www.gebweb.net/optimap/. It essentially brute forces a solution to the traveling salesman problem using data from google maps. I find the interface a little tedious and I wish there were ways to insert additional constraints. There's also an extension to the problem where you are trying to optimize both time and distance at the same time. I haven't found anything to do that. Here's a sample route to a handful of places:


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