Taking the Long Way Around

Last fall, after a round of layoffs at my workplace, I decided that the job I was in was just never going to take off. I felt that it was time to look for something new and I would start looking in the spring. As it happens I ended up being canned as well in January! It was a good thing as I had some family issues that I needed to take care of anyway. In the end it seems that a whole bunch of circumstances came together to pave the way for something interesting.

At the very beginning I got the idea that I should use the time between jobs to take an extended vacation that I would not otherwise be able to do. Somehow the idea that I should drive across Canada came into my head. "What a cool adventure!" I though, so I jumped on to Google maps to see where I should go. After about an hour of rolling across the maps and satellite imagery I had a route plan and some interesting ideas that sprouted in my head along the way.

Now I have not done a lot of traveling at all in my life. I had never even seen Canada outside of my home province of Ontario and where I live is not an all that interesting place to be.
I decided that I wanted to see All of Canada. Everything that I could get to by car anyway. Since I live in Windsor, which is practically the southern most place in Canada, I had a good starting point from which to start out.

I decided that I would go all the way out East through all of the Maritimes to the Atlantic coast. From there I would head back through Ontario and then on out to the Prairies.
Way up North would not be possible as there are no roads, but I could at least get to the Yukon. I decided to go North West though the prairies to get up to there. From the Yukon I could then head down through BC and take the ferry to Vancouver Island to get to the Pacific coast.
I could then take the southern route back across the prairies without backtracking over too many places I had been. This route will take me through every province and one of the territories. Not a bad grand tour!

Now being the technical person that I am, I wanted to do something to make the trip more interesting since I had some time before the summer to prepare for the trip. I had been planning to add a computer to the car for a while now ever since I removed the broken radio. So I finally got to work and built a PC that would replace the radio and provide some more features as well.
I came up with a special idea to add a web cam pointing out the front window and to have it take a time lapse movie of the whole trip. I had never seen it done before for such a long trip so I decided this would be an important thing to try.
Of course I added GPS to this computer and it will log my path for the whole trip but one more idea came to mind as well. Spark Fun sells some cool components like their Weather board so I decided to add it in to have a log of the pressure, humidity and temperature of where we went for the whole trip. It should be interesting to see the pressure drop as we head up into the mountains. I hope that at the end of the trip I'll have some really interesting data.
I'll post another article with the technical details of what I did for all the geeks out there who love that stuff as much as I do.

Tomorrow a friend and I shall set out on a trip of some 20000 Km. It should be quite the adventure and I hope to share some of the highlights of this trip with my friends and family though this blog. Please check back regularly as I hope to have lots of pictures, videos and stories to share!

Tomorrow we hit the open road! Wish us luck!

Mark :D