Trip Planning for 2013

Planning for a 10 to12 week trip to the east coast requires time, patience and ingenuity. Hours can be spent pouring over maps, searching the Internet and discussing options. The last large road trip that I made was basically planned by the helpful folks at the nearest BCAA office. I told them my destination and they provided me with a hard copy of a TripTik. Today you can go online, create and print it yourself. A much more difficult process for the consumer. Since I was heading to BCAA today to renew my motorcycle insurance it was an opportune time to ask if they still provided the convenient coil-bound printed version. I was skeptical about it still being a free service but a solid starting point for planning this journey would be worth several skipped lattes.

The visit to BCAA exceeded my expectations. Firstly, I hadn't been able to find the expired insurance papers and the service rep thought outside the box and managed to find it in the ICBC system. Once the insurance purchase was completed we broached the topic of Trip Tiks. My friend Ruth spent hours last night entering our planned route into the online program only to discover that it was more than 150 pages to print. The service rep smiled and said you really want the old fashioned variety for this trip. She then showed us a sample and I said yes that's what I've had before. Ruth hadn't seen one before and was impressed with the symbols that refer you to the guide books and the fold-out maps for towns and cities. The agent opened a map, took the cap off a highlighter and asked where we were starting. It's very hard to read a map upside down so she turned it around and handed me the pen. It was a very collaborative process~~when we hit an area that we were unsure about she was able to tell us which route most travellers chose.
When we finished marking the map she thanked us! Two copies of the Trip Tik will be ready in a week at NO charge and we left with two copies of each guidebook that we will need. All this accomplished in under an hour, a short and productive planning session.