Wash and Waze... Sunday, September 30, 2012

Today was more for getting ready for the next week of vacation than anything else.

The KOA served free waffles for breakfast, so I took advantage of that, while Chris finished off some of the leftovers from our sojourn in the Raleigh, North Carolina, area.

We then decided it was a good time to do our laundry there at the campground. These clean clothes will see us through to the end of this year's vacation.

The afternoon was then devoted to heading south into South Carolina. This is another new state for our map on the side of the camper. (We mark the states we have gone to IN THE CAMPER VAN; not in other ways or times). We know only have Georgia, Michigan, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Hawaii left in the U.S. We'll get Georgia this week; odds are we'll never take the camper van to Hawaii. So we've visited most of the states since we purchased the camper a few years ago! We've also visited Manitoba and Saskatchewan, so we still have some Canadian provinces to go.

We ate lunch at Zachary's Pizza & Restaurant in Saint Pauls, North Carolina. The Veggie was very good.

A visit to the South Carolina Welcome Center on I-95 was the main high point of the late afternoon. We picked up some tourist materials, including some information about campgrounds. We decided to check out Poinsett State Park. That's where we decided to stay; the sites are really nice and roomy.

Tomorrow's plans include visiting Manning, South Carolina, just a few miles away. When Chris was in college, he actually sold Bibles in this area one summer! Manning is where he lived, and I'd like to see a little of his past.

While driving past on the way to the campground, Chris says it looks like it may be quite a bit larger than it was in the late 1970s. I'm not at all surprised; when I attended high school in Wellsville, Kansas, in the late 1960s, nearby Gardner, Kansas, was still a pretty small town nearby. Now Gardner is growing constantly and seems to be almost an extension of the greater Kansas City metro area!

During the day, I added a new app on my Android called Waze. Waze serves as a navigator program, but also has a social aspect. Users report problems like heavy traffic, accidents, cars parked on the shoulder, etc., which Waze can use to suggest alternate, faster routes for commuters, etc.

It's been fun learning to use the functions included today, and tonight we actually used the Waze site on the laptop to edit the South Carolina map!  If you travel on a road that is not marked in Waze, you can mark it as "Paved". Then you can go in on the computer and actually add that road and more information to the Waze maps and database!

There's definitely a learning curve for the editing, but I think I'm getting better. The roads leading to our campsite were not shown correctly; I think they are better now.

I also discovered that Waze's map editor works best with Chrome, so downloaded that browser too!