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January 26, 2007
Eric Burns-White: Perhaps my favorite correction of all time.
I have been told in the mail which is electronic that in fact "shunpiking" is in the dictionary.
I have confirmed this fact.
My thanks to those who e-mailed. I'm curiously delighted by this turn of events -- it's somewhat like discovering that Bigfoot has been in the Bronx Zoo since 1977 and they just have a bad publicity department.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:18 AM | Comments (8)
January 25, 2007
Eric Burns-White: On having a research department, even when they don't know it.
A couple of days ago, I caught a story.
This happens to me. I'll be walking or driving along, and something will occur to me, and I'll decide "huh." And the next thing I know I've got an opening, at least twelve scenes and a denouement in my brain, trying to claw their way out. And, because I was cursed by influenced by Hard Science Fiction, I then need to... oh, you know, do real honest to Christ research on the subject in question.
Now, this is not science fiction. If anything, it's Magical Realism, set in today's world. Something very Sean Stewart, with a soupçon of Hal Duncan for good measure.
What?
Soupçon.
It's a word.
Yes, it's originally from the French, but it's an actual, honest to Christ in-Webster's word now. It means "smidge."
No I couldn't "just say smidge." Jesus.
Anyway.
Lost my train of thought.
Oh, right. The story. It's a very contemporary story, and it's meant to actually be a road trip sort of story. In fact, it's meant to be a shunpiking story. Shunpiking isn't in Webster's but it's a fantastic word which should be. It means "avoiding major highways and interstates and turnpikes in lieu of back roads, secondary roads and the like." It means taking the remnants of old Route 66 instead of the thruway. It means driving through small towns and places instead of bypassing them.
That's what this story needs.
So I want to do it right. So I have a starting point and an ending point. And I have an internet. And if you look at our friend Mapquest, they have an "avoid Highways" feature to them! Score!
Only... said feature only works for trips of 250 miles or less. And even with interstates and highways, it estimates the trip I'm describing as over 2,700 miles.
Now, going step by step, leg by leg in 250 mile jumps is one solution to this problem. But it's not a good solution. See, the only way to effectively do that is to chart your course via interstates and then select waypoints along the way. You can then tell it to give you a shunpiker's route between those waypoints. The problem is, it's entirely possible that if you shunpiked across the country you'd end up far away from where the highways run, through the dead areas between major interstates. By using the highways as your guide, you end up less shunpiking and more tacking around the direct route -- you still end up passing through the major points serviced by those highways. It's just less convenient for you.
I checked the other driving direction services online, and as near as I can tell, those services don't even have a shunpiking function.
So, I've spent the last several days wrestling with this -- in my brain. I've been trying to either find a new service or find software that might do it without being unreasonably expensive for what, in the end, is going to be a single use or... I don't know. Something. Because I really, really want to do this right, and I don't see any good way to do it electronically.
This morning, the solution hit me. It had the triple advantage of not costing me anything (at least anything additional), giving me the route I specifically want, and providing me monumental amounts of research on the side, thus saving me time elsewhere in this process.
See, I'm a Triple-A member. I have been... well, practically forever. And once upon a time, before GPSes and the Internet, they were my route planners. If you're a member, you can call them up any time and order a triptik -- a printed series of flip maps with your route highlighted in orange highlighter, that someone has painstakingly mapped out for you.
I haven't used them for this in years. Between things like Mapquest and GPSes, I have lots more convenient ways to find routes to where I'm going. I'm sure they've had a sharp decline in these services over the years.
But now I had a project my GPS and Internet couldn't help me with.
So I called my member service number (not the roadside assistance number), and talked to a travel agent. And she cheerfully took the information I wanted down. I told her about the shunpiking, and she told me she could arrange all secondary and back roads with no problem at all -- where possible, anyway. And she offered to send along state maps and tour guide books with tons of additional information. All, of course, at no charge. I am a member, after all.
It is worth occasionally remembering that as wonderful as our Internet is, there are times the good old fashioned way is vastly better.
Things have been nuts. Catching up begins now. Rock on, dudes.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:34 AM | Comments (23)
