When we cross the border into Canada, we have to shut the BlackBerry off and take the battery out so we don’t get hit with outrageous international roaming charges.

Suddenly we’re on visual flight rules. How exciting!

I was promoted to my family’s designated navigator in elementary school, so I am perfectly happy working with a paper map.  In a pinch, Neil and I have navigated on this trip using the simplified maps in travel coupon books, the zoomed out maps in hotel chain directories, and the cartoon maps on promotional placemats.  We like to make the most of the tools at hand.

“Eyeballing it” works out fine for highway driving, but gets a little more exciting when we’re in traffic in the heart of a big city.  We do our best to time our travel for off-peak traffic hours, and that helps to some extent.

What losing the BlackBerry means for me as the navigator, over and above losing electronic maps and voice prompts, is that I now get to front-load my work.  Every night, I’ll be preparing for the next day by researching (gluten-free) restaurants, facilities, etc., on the Internet, looking up directions, etc.  I do a lot of that kind of preparation even when we do use the BlackBerry, so it isn’t a big change for me.  I’m all in favour of “spontaneous” and unplanned travel, in theory–it just becomes a little impractical when you are traveling with any kind of health, physical, or dietary limitations.  You know what they say: a navigator’s work is never done.

Going VFR is exciting, and I know we’ll manage just fine, especially if I can stay awake long enough at night to do the next day’s prep.

It’s just that losing the BlackBerry feels just a little bit like sailing off the end of the world.

And doesn’t every traveler want to feel that way sometime?

My understanding is that bed bugs are not snobs and do not discriminate between four-star and no-star hotels: going upscale and paying more money doesn’t guarantee you’ll avoid getting eaten alive.

I am researching and reading travel reviews much more thoroughly than normal. I really don’t want to check my parents into La Casa del Scratch.

When you’re booking your own accommodations, how do you figure out whether a hotel has bed bugs?

If anyone has good advice on how to verify in advance that a (Montreal) hotel is bug-free, I would love your help!

To fill the time until we come back, we give you a picture of a painted flossie on a Charleston street corner at Christmastime.

We have not fallen from the face of the Earth, nor have we ended our trip. We expect a lot more of the latter (and hopefully less of the former) in the future.

Rather, we’re in Charleston.

We’re having a bit of a winter visit, as the Neil-side of the family has had a member in the hospital (things are going astonishingly well with that) and we turned the ability to live anywhere into an opportunity to live nearby for a while. After a brief stopover in Summerville, we are staying in beautiful Historic Charleston, down with all the SOBs (South of Broad Streeters, for the passers-by; the NOBs live on the other side).

We will be taking the opportunity to have a good visit with family and friends (Shaula has never lived in Charleston before, and Neil hasn’t in a decade) and taking lots of pictures. While most of you probably won’t be interested in where Neil went to school, or stopped for a car on fire, we hope to get lots of postable pictures of historic places and changes in the city.

We currently have no plans of riding the Coburg Cow.

Today we launch a whole new chapter of the trip: we exit Virginia (for the third time this trip) to head west for Tennessee.

As much as we love Virginia, it’s time to make like a tree and leave.

Maple leaves on the lawn of the Rockridge Virginia Court House, October 5, 2008

“$29 for a hotel in downtown Boston? You’d have to bring your own fleas!”
— Neil

In response to my announcement that I’d found a room for $29 in Boston (which turned out to be $329).

We have just added a “Free WiFi Finders” section to our sidebar to list our favourite free wifi resources. These are all sites that we use ourselves, and we hope you find them as useful as we do.

Free WiFi Directories

• AnchorFree uses a zoomable map to list Free WiFi all over the world. (INTERNATIONAL)
• gWiFi.net primarily lists wifi spots in NYC, but you can add other locations to their system, too. (NYC)
• OpenWifiSpots is one of the two most comprehensive free wifi directory we’ve found for the US so far. It is searchable by address or by zip code. (USA)
• Free wi-fi hotspots is another global directory, with comprehensive US listings, too. It lists hotspots by state / city or international region. (INTERNATIONAL / USA)

Wifi Coffee Shop Directories

• Panera Bread Bakery-Cafe offers free wifi at over 1200 locations in the US. You can search by address, state, or zip code, or you can use their state-by-state wifi locations list. (USA)
• indie coffee shops is a GREAT resource for people like us who prefer to support locally-owned and -operated businesses. The site includes mainly cafes in the US on their zoomable/searchable map, but also a handful in Canada, and you can filter the listings to show indie coffee shops that offer free wifi. (USA)

Keeping these directories up-to-date relies on the volunteer efforts of people all over the world. A great way to give back to the wifi community and to help the independent businesses in your area is to make sure that all of your favourite wifi providers are listed. (If you can’t find your favourite places, send in their information using the submission forms.) While we’ve been in Sturbridge, MA, we have submitted the information for the Sturbridge Coffee House and the Old Sturbridge Village Cafe.

We’ll keep updating our list as we test more wifi directories if a site isn’t listed that you like to use, please let us know!

The weather here in Sturbridge, Massachusetts has been unseasonably rainy, with higher temperatures predicted in the next few days. It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to remain in the northeast and escape the rain, but at least we’d like to go far enough north that we can escape the heat.

It seems that no matter where we’ve been in July and August, I’ve either been wiped out by the hot weather or by the wet weather, so we’ve mostly given up on visiting friends until the fall, when I will hopefully be far more functional than I am now. (I’m not in bad shape, but I’m just not at my most gregarious either.)

Our current (provisional) plan is still to hole up somewhere until the heat has gone, and then meander back to Richmond, Virginia to pick up our fall clothes, and visit friends on our way back south. (I should bear up better to the hurly-burly of places like Boston and New York when it has cooled down a little, too.)

Unfortunately, we’re not the only people with the bright idea of escaping the summer heat here, and we’re finding it quite a challenge to locate affordable (by which we mean dirt cheap) accommodations for the rest of August in Maine.

We’re widening our scope and looking at places in Vermont and New Hampshire, too. In fact, if anyone can recommend a reliably cool corner of Massachusetts, we’d be happy to stick around here as well.

Our criteria for places to stay are:

• weather consistently under 80 degrees or so; the cooler the better
• high speed Internet access (so Neil doesn’t have to work out of cafes)
• affordable (meaning as cheap as possible)
• in the North East
• locally-owned, mom-and-pop businesses are a big bonus

If anyone has recommendations for Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, or even Massachusetts, for places to stay, or towns/areas to check out, or tips on finding affordable places, we would LOVE to hear your suggestions!

One way or the other, we’re on the road tomorrow.  We’ll let you know where we’re heading as soon as we know ourselves!

And that’s why, when Neil and I are sitting in a public place, using two laptops, and sharing just one power cable, I think of it as the “Laptop Scuba Dance.”

Right now we are sitting in front of an unlit fireplace in beautifully upholstered wing chairs in the lobby of the Publick House Historic Inn in Sturbridge, Massachusetts.  There’s free wifi in the hotel, but just in the historic parts (ironically), not in the newer (and vastly cheaper) motel section where we’re rooming.

Sturbridge is a great place to buy antiques, but not such a great place to find free public wifi.  Because Neil is working during the day, that means we spend our daylight hours loitering the public areas of the Inn.

The lobby fireplace is the first place we’ve also managed to find a power outlet, but it is only within range of one chair.  So every 45 minutes or so, we have a conversation like this:

Neil: How’s your battery power?

Me: I’m good, I’m at 42%.

Neil: I’m down to 11%.

Me: Okay, let’s trade.

We proceed to trade chairs and the swap the power cable into the dying laptop.

Our laptop batteries are asymptotically approaching nothingness, but we do manage to limp them through an entire working day this way.

And when the staff gives us funny looks for getting up and swapping chairs, Neil tells them that it’s because the music has stopped.

I should point out that the staff here have been very understanding about our loitering tendencies. In fact, it was the rooms manager who suggested that we make use of the wifi in the common areas, and she has been having great fun giving us a hard time about what a good job we’re doing of advertising their wifi service.

(We’ve been very impressed with all of the staff here; if I were still a hospitality recruiter I’d be doing my best to headhunt them!)

The only disadvantage to our current location is that we are sitting right next to the main dining room, and the smells from lunch are incredibly tantalizing.  (There may be some colonial deep dish apple pie in our near future.)

The main dining room of the Publick Houses’s Tap Room restaurant. Taken with the camera on Neil’s BlackBerry at breakfast on Monday, August 11, 2008.

I’m sure the burning question on your mind is: Does Neil get a big heroic smooch every time he trades off the power supply to save my laptop?

You’ll have to try to squeeze an answer out of the Public House staff: I don’t kiss and tell.

And now the next time you have to borrow a laptop power supply, you’ll know the name of the dance you’re doing.

First of all, we’re going to try to hit all 48 contiguous US states on this trip.

Secondly, we’re going to send a postcard to each of our nephews from every state we visit.

We don’t live near the boys and don’t get to see them often enough—we look forward to visiting them in Tennessee and Minnesota on this trip!   (Unfortunately, we don’t have room in the Mini to buy them presents on the road: we’d have to throw out something to make room, like our clean underwear, which might not bother Neil but would be a problem for me.)

We’d love to find ways to be a cool uncle and aunt to T. and B., who are very cool young men in their own rights.  We’re hoping that the postcards can be a way to share the adventure of the trip with them (and double as a geography lesson, too).

We just bought our first postcards today, which means we’ll have to double back and get postcards from New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland when we head back to Richmond to grab our suitcase of warm clothes in the fall.  That’s okay: our nephews are worth it!

If you have a suggestion for the ultimate postcard from the state you live in, or states you’ve visited, let us know!

Never let it be said that we are beyond correction.  (At least not by anyone other than our mothers.)

While it’s a challenge on a no-plans, no-deadlines trip like ours, we’ll try to give everyone a heads up on where we are heading in advance.  (Just don’t be surprised if our plans change.  It’s that kind of trip.) We really appreciate all the suggestions and introductions we’ve received from friends, and we want to make sure we can receive your ideas in a timely manner.

Our Current Course
We checked out of the Syracuse Microtel this morning, had a great breakfast at the famous 24-hour Doc’s Little Gem Diner, and now we’re sitting in Panera, sipping tea, soaking up their free wifi, and plotting out our course for the day.

Our provisional plan is to drive straight to Utica, NY, pick up groceries for a late picnic lunch, and then drive through Adirondack Park.  We may come out in Plattsburgh, NY or in Burlington, VT—depending on luck, navigation skills, and where we can find the best rate on a room.

From the far side of Adirondack Park we are heading towards Maine, in no rush and with no particular destination in mind (although a friend recommended a sushi restaurant that we’ll be doing our best to check out).

If you know of anywhere we should stay, anything we should eat, or anything we should see or do between Syracuse and the Atlantic, drop us a line!

(Incidentally, this is Shaula, writing under Neil’s login.  If you leave a comment on this post, the blog will send a notification straight to his BlackBerry, so any suggestions you give us today we can receive live on the road!)

If you want to make sure you get our travel plans in real time so you can get suggestions to us on the road, you can sign up to get Your Mileage May Vary by email or subscribe to the YMMV RSS feed, too!

And if you haven’t heard from us in a while, check the weather report: that’s probably the most accurate way to figure out where we are.