I don't know if this is of any interest to anyone else, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, I have put together my own guide book for this trip.

Most solo road trips, I have a general idea where I want to go and when I want to arrive and maybe some handwritten notes or a couple pages printed from Google maps and that's good enough. This trip, I am using Apple's iBooks Author software to create a professional quality (okay, maybe not that good, but pretty good nonetheless) guide book of the trip. Because I want to hug the river as closely as possible, I really need good maps and turn-by-turn directions.

The book is centered around "crossings" of the river, so each crossing gets its own page, map, and photo gallery. I included a brief history and trivia, mostly from Wikipedia and a photo gallery on each page. Right now the gallery only has pictures found on the internet, but when I get home from the trip I will replace them with my own pictures that I took along the way. There is another chapter with turn-by-turn directions for each leg and yet more maps. I made everything on this page big enough that I can read it without my glasses so hopefully it will be very useful as I navigate. There are a lot of links in the book to other pages on the internet for more information, but I designed it to be useful without an internet connection.

My plan is to take voice memos and lots of pictures along the route and when I get home I will update the book with my own content to supplement the stuff that's already there. I have a couple books already in Apple's bookstore, so if it looks really good when I'm done I might put it on the store to share with the world.

If you have an iPad and would like to see it in it's current unfinished state, surf to this link with with your iPad and when it asks you what to open the file with, select iBooks.

http://techquarium.com/innocuous/Mis...%20Trip.ibooks

I would love to hear what other road trippers think of the book. I'm trying hard to make it useful for the trip. My wife and friends think it's crazy overkill, but I'm having fun with it.

Note, all the maps and picture galleries are interactive and can be zoomed and viewed in various ways. Experiment with pinch/zoom/tap/etc!