How do I chronicle my Roadgeek experience?
Roadgeeks have various different goals and specific interests within the overall realm of roads, but Roadgeeks are united in that they generally like to engage with roads and traveling on them. All Roadgeeks have dreams of seeing the different highways in different places, and a lot of them like to keep track of their accomplishments. Different Roadgeeks have different ideas of which accomplishments they'd like to seek out, like driving the most highway mileage, driving the most highways of a particular type, driving the most highway mileage in a certain state, entering the most states, entering the most counties, photographing the most individual route markers, or many other objectives. A lot of Roadgeeks have found ways to turn their travels into a collect-athon, skirting across their country or region to clamor for the most states visited, counties visited, miles traveled, or routes encountered.
So how does a Roadgeek chronicle their accomplishments?
So how does a Roadgeek chronicle their accomplishments?
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First, I'll mention Travel Mapping, often abbreviated "TM" in the Roadgeek community. Travel Mapping is extremely handy for keeping track of the highway mileage you've driven, in most of the United States and many other countries as well. To get started on Travel Mapping, you need to create an account. This page explains how to get started. You basically make a file in Notepad with the ".list" file extension and submit it every time you wish to update it. The highway browser shows you what to type into your ".list" file. One beautiful thing about this website is that you can keep track of only the mileage you care about. If you only care about your Interstate mileage, you can just update the Interstate mileage. If you only care about the mileage you've accrued in your own state, you can just keep track of that. You might be tempted to get competitive, comparing your mileage with those of other people, but this is totally pointless because different people have vastly different reserves of money and time, with which to travel around collecting mileage. Really, Travel Mapping and the other sites for chronicling your achievements are only useful for competing with yourself, as a geographical checklist for your own personal use. It's wonderfully useful for that purpose, though, so click here to check out Travel Mapping! |
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Second, I'll mention County Clinching. "Mob-rule.com" is the best place to keep track of the counties you've traversed. This page shows you how to get started on their site. Clickable maps at the county level allow you to decide which counties you want to shade in, so you can keep track of the counties you've "clinched". (The Roadgeek community likes to use the word "clinch" as the verb describing when you've collected a piece of geography. "Clinching" a highway means to drive its entire length.) Do you want to have separate colors corresponding to categories, of the year you visited the county or how much time you spent in that county? Mob-rule allows you to do that, and you can choose whatever you want to do with the colors. Mob-rule is also really useful in providing an overlay of the county boundaries on Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps. If you want to get into thinking about your past travels, down to the county level, as a nice trip down memory lane? Check out Mob-rule. |
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Third, I'll mention Routesnapping, a term I invented for an activity that I definitely wasn't the first to invent. The first and most dominant goal I hope to achieve is to photograph a route marker for every highway in a certain category. That category can be whatever you want it to be: it can be every highway in a certain state, or every highway of a certain type. You don't need a highly-specific website to keep track of your accomplishments; you just need a place to store your photos and show them to people, if and only if you want to show them off. I personally use Flickr. Just make a photo album, and decide whether you want to share it with people or keep it private--both options are acceptable. And that's all you need to do! Be sure to visit my Routesnapping page for tips on how to make a gallery of route photos, and more importantly, how to take photos safely. |
