Engineering a New World

This is a thank-you for the guys at Carr Subaru, who set us up with our 2006 Subaru Impreza that we used to haul all of our gear across the country.

I figured that most of the people who buy cars from you either (a) never hear from again, or (b) only hear from them again when they come in to bring the car into the shop for repairs.  So, I figured I’d give you some feedback that the car performed perfectly despite the fact that we loaded it up to the limit in terms of towing capacity (around 2000lbs in tow), and hauled it over a 6800’ pass in the Oregon Cascades, a 7200’ pass in Arizona/Nevada, and a 10,600’ pass in Colorado.

And – I might add, we got an average of 20mpg, despite towing!

So, despite the fact that it’s the base 173hp engine and not the WRX, it performed like a champ.  Here’s a couple of photos for you:  [and a map of our trip is here]

In the middle of the Cascades	At a snow-park in the Oregon Cascades
Near Diamond Peak in Oregon	At our Hotel in Las Vegas
[video] Going through a windy pass in Arizona	In the middle of the rain in Utah
At the summit of Vail Pass at 10,603’ in Colorado	Vail Pass, Colorado
Panorama shot – Vail Pass Colorado
[video] Nasty rain storm in Kansas	The 4000th mile of our trip, in Virginia

So, thanks guys!  The car is great!

Now that my cross-country trip is drawing to a close (I should be pulling in to my destination in the DC area tomorrow) I’ve been trying to figure out a cool Web 2.0-style way of displaying where we went on this trip, with the route we took, geo-tagged photos, videos, and all of that sort of thing. 

Unfortunately, I could not find any service that would let me mash up the geo-data I already have stored in Flickr (and I’ve painstakingly geo-tagged all my photos) and then add in some sort of way to draw the lines where we went on the trip.

Furthermore, Flickr maps – as cool as they are – will only display a page of your photos at a time.  So, although I have representative photos that basically draw a line all of the way across the USA, you can’t see that if you look at the map.  So, I’ve been trying to find something better.

Now, Google Maps lets me do something like the following, where I can at least easily load up a map with all manner of meta-data (points, lines that follow roads, HTML, etc) and slap it up on a publicly-available map:

View Cross-Country Road Trip in a larger map

This is a step in the right direction, though I still can’t integrate my Flickr geo-data with the map. So, that leaves me to painstakingly re-add all of my geo-data, or figure out another make-sense way of displaying the data. Still pretty nifty, but someone has GOT to have already worked out a solution to this. It’s not like I’m the first blogger/web 2.0 geek to go on a road trip!