Planning US Coast-to-coast trip

I missed the start of the thread. However, I did a coast-to-coast trip
in a strictly VFR only Cessna 140.

Three observations:
It's no harder to plan than any other cross country
Be flexible (you have a wide choice of routes when doing such a long
trip - fly where the weather is best)
Make sure you have contingencies for maintenance. My trip involved
100 hours of flying. This means at least two maintenance days assuming
nothing broke.

On the maintenance angle, fortunately my trip was purely for the fun of
exploring - so I could plan to be back at base for scheduled
maintenance. I still had the generator fail halfway through though -
fortunately, I found a shop where we could rebuild the thing there and
then.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"

20-25 days seems like a long time.
I went from las vegas to louisville Ky in 9.5 hours I think it was in my
arrow. I went more direct then you are planning tho. I had only 2 fuel
stops, one in ABQ and one in Joplin Mo.

As for vegas stop, McCarren Vs. North las vegas, dont look at the
distance, its nothing, you can see both airports from either. If your
planning on flying north after fuel, then go into VGT (north las vegas) if
your goig south or east, then Hendeson (HND) is the better choice. also
winds come into play, north vegas typically seems to have less wind then
HND does but HND has a 6000 ft runway and way less traffic then an airport
in the area. How ever you do it, talk to LAS when you get close to the
class B.

Tomek Zielinski wrote:

Hi,

In a month time from now I plan to start my 20 to 25 days VFR flying
trip in C-172 from San Diego to the East Coast (hopefully to Key West)
and back.

I published my initial planning on the internet, here is the link:
http://www.astercity.net/~tomekz/us_...5_planning.htm

I tried to plan the route in such a way that stops are near some
tourist attractions (National Parks, museums, etc.), of course I
cannot include all attractions on the way because then the trip would
have to take much longer than 20-25 days. Naturally this is just an
initial plan, at the end of the day the route and how far we will get
will depend entirely on weather.

I would very much appreciate your comments and suggestions about my
route, airports I have chosen (or should choose) and places to visit
along this route.

I also intend to make another page with the report from the trip
progress (with photos of course ;-)) that I will try to update during
the trip.

cheers,

Tomek Zielinski
PP-ASEL