This trip is a bit unusual. Instead of flying, renting a car, and driving, I decided to pack up the old Hyundai Santa Fe (and I do mean old: the trip started with 94,000 on the odometer!) and drive as far as I could in one week. Leaving from home had its advantages. I was able to pack my bicycle, and I didn’t have to worry about fitting all my possessions into just one or two suitcases.
This is also the first trip on which I tried something new. I devised a plan to record video of every mile I drove. Such an idea would have been expensive or impossible just a few years ago, but now, it only required an investment of about $200. I purchased a Kodak Zx1 Hi-Def mini camcorder, a 16 gigabyte memory chip, and a cigarette-lighter power supply. Whenever I started driving, I pressed record. When I parked, I stopped the recording. Except for a couple of forgetful moments, I managed to record all of the 3,379.9 miles of this trip. I’ve broken many of the segments down into watchable, high-speed clips, and included them on this page. Here’s an example that starts in my driveway, and ends at the northern end of the Suncoast Parkway (Florida Road 589).
[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TowYv6bvQVU”]
SR 589 ends at US 98, which just happened to be the highway I needed to carry me all the way up the Florida peninsula, and over the panhandle, towards my first night’s stop in Mobile, Alabama. Between Tampa and Perry, Florida, I only made one stop…
… when I spotted these old US highway signs north of Chiefland, Florida. You can’t actually see them from US 19/98 — they’re on a side road. But, I remembered seeing them several years ago, and I had always wanted a picture of them.
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