On Friday, we're planning to load up the minivan and drive 600 miles to visit the grandparents. My Mom was going to come up to Boston in February, right after Marshall was born, but she fell and broke her hip and hasn't had a chance to meet Marshall yet.

Planning a drive from Boston to Virginia brings back fond, faded memories of 20 years ago when such a drive was done alone, all night, with a pack of Lucky Strikes and cooler full of Coca-Cola...back when gas was perhaps $1/gallon. Lots of things have changed since then.

Back then, it was an adventure; I had flown to Boston after high school to attend MIT and generally flown cheap flights back and forth until one summer when I had a car. My high school friend and I drove up from VA, and I drove back and forth a few times marking the landmarks and getting a feel for the size of the East Coast. Later, my wife and I would drive across country, back and forth at least half a dozen times, and I always felt the drive helped me really get a feel for the size of our country and a sense of what lies between.

But this time, it's a different type of adventure. It will be a two-day trip; we leave Friday evening with a goal of crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge and getting to a hotel before midnight. Then up early to push through a no-traffic morning past Baltimore, DC, Richmond and deep into the heart of Virginia. Oh yeah, we also have a 4-month old, a 2 1/2 yr old, and a 4 yr old who will be sharing this adventure with us. Hope they sleep. I need to burn a few more copies of Wonder Pets and Max and Ruby before we leave...

But one thing that is easier this time is planning the route. Google Maps has changed everything with the following enhancements in the past year or so...that really work:

• Adjusting your route - after doing the basic from/to driving directions, you can click on any part of the route and drag it to an alternate route. While you drag, the route changes to recalculate an optimal route through the point you are selecting and displays the distance and time. Google had me going straight down 95, across the Cross Bronx Expressway and George Washington Bridge, and continuing down 95. I know, from folklore and experience, that route is a bad idea unless it's 2am. So I can pull the route over to Nyack and force a route through Tappan Zee--adding a few miles, but bypassing the core New York City nightmare and routing me down the path I recall--the Garden State Parkway all the way down to rejoin the New Jersey Turnpike farther down.
• Traffic prediction - the really new thing I discovered was Google's new predictive traffic feature. You can select the traffic button on a map of a major metro area to display color coded maps showing current traffic conditions (i.e. red lines indicate stop and go). I noticed a link to Live Traffic/change and found I could set the day of week and time to see Google's prediction of traffic delays. I could use this to decide whether it is worthwhile to plot a bypass of Hartford, how much of a detour across Tappan Zee is worthwhile to get me out of the core mess in NYC, and what to expect coming back.

There's much we cannot plan. Maybe the kids will sleep a lot. Maybe there will be much crying. We've done drives to the Adirondacks and sometimes that has been a 5 1/2 hour drive with mostly sleeping. But because this trip involves 4 separate days of travel, it is kind of like the NBA finals--but it's a 4-game series we want to sweep.