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I call them Milestone Charts, after their reliance on highway milemarkers.
They started as a short list of Cracker Barrel restaurants, rest areas,
and a few gas stations along I-85 in
SC and NC. Now they have grown to include most fast food restaurants, three
brands of gasoline, KOA, and some extras. Besides I-85, I have tried to
document every major route that I've travelled.
I encourage anyone to make their own charts and/or share charts
to promote an open public forum of Interstate info.
I've been using Microsoft Excel to keep track of the information, starting
with version 2.2 and moving up as my access at Clemson upgraded.
A Legend
I've not made up an official legend, so here's an explanation.
- Transition
- indicates when a switch to another highway is made, as
read down the list. It's possible to read up the list by looking at
the description of the first exit following a transition.
- Mile
- indicates the exit number and/or the milemarker nearest
the highway feature. In states such as GA and FL, both exit number and milemarker are necessary to convey the information of how far along the highway the
exit is. In these states, exit numbers aren't based on milemarkers.
A number following an @ symbol is a milemarker-based measurement.
A number by itself or preceding an @ symbol is an exit number.
- Description
- includes exit information such as road names, nearby cities, and following a
semi-colon, services that are not in the checklist.
- The restaurants
-
are ten columns of food services: Arby's, Burger King, Cracker Barrel,
Dairy Queen, Hardee's, KFC (also used for Bojangle's and Popeye's), McDonald's,
Subway, Taco Bell, Wendy's.
- Rest
- for rest areas, indicates the highway direction of the side on
which there is a stop. (H) indicates a hospital, and (hp) indicates a highway
patrol barracks. A small i indicates information at a stop.
- KOA
- is just for Kampgrounds of America.
- The gas stations
- three of them, were chosen for their relatively low prices, and
same price for cash or credit.
Some gas stations such as Speedway and RaceTrac have
usually lower prices, but aren't as plentiful, so they are mentioned in
the description column. $$ means there's been a recent citing of a
very low price.
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HTML Milestone charts
Presenting them on the web is experimental. When printed they should be
one page wide. The column headers can't be printed on every page as
it's impossible (I believe) to know where the page breaks will fall on
any one printer.
Excel's HTML output isn't customizable. This means that it took
some editing to make the table columns as narrow as possible, and to eliminate
unneccessary font tags. HTML versions also didn't have the repeating
column headings on each page of a printout. So I'll use PDF instead...
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PDF files
Since Acrobat Reader is free, and Excel is not, PDF files are more accessible.
So here I'll try to keep up-to-date copies of the charts I use.
Related Sites
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