Setting up your Sector
by Mark Stephenson, Arizona SC, with input from successful SCs of JONAT 2004

You've been assigned a sector! Here's where the fun begins. (OK, maybe I'm strange, but it's fun to me.) Depending on how familiar you are with your area, you may have the ideas fermenting even as you read this. Keep in mind the parameters you are working with: 3-4 days, a couple hundred miles or so per day excluding short or no drive days where you might plan something captivating, and focusing on what's interesting to the local crowd. Here are things that should or did boost turnout on sectors in 2004.

The first three things

Spread the word that you or your club has a sector in the JONAT. Fill them in on what JONAT is. (We'll have some cookie-cutter press releases available on the JONAT site that you can customize for your club newsletter or website.) Let them know that planning is underway. If you don't know who the folks who love to drive are, find out and figure out what they and local Jaguar owners would like to do, see, and where they'd like to drive. Throw out your ideas and see if they like them. Now you have an idea of what will make the natives restless.

Grab every paper map you can get your hands on. On-line maps are great for directions and they'll come in handy, but initially, you need paper. A North American Road Atlas is great to give a feel for where the tour is coming from and going to, especially if you are stretching across multiple states or provinces. The big folding gas-station-style state/provincial maps put everything into perspective. For detail try the DeLorme's Atlas & Gazetteer Series for your state. Arizona is displayed across 55 11"x15" pages. Contour lines show the elevation and terrain. If you're in the western U.S., Benchmark Maps also has good atlases. While they show contours less effectively with shading, they distinguish clearly between paved and unpaved roads. The atlases are generally available at big box stores at a large discount. I use all four sources extensively. If there is anything similar available in Canada, please send me links.

Check again and periodically for events that coincide with JONAT. This is kind of an ongoing thing. You may learn of something that will really interest locals and long-distance travelers. See if you can fit it in.

With all this information at hand, the hard part is trying to figure out how to do it all. At this point you are developing a strategy more than a trip. Don't forget that part of the strategy is getting people from the "home city" to the start and back from the end. I personally like historic roads and sites and have found that having a story associated with them piques interest. On the tour itself, I avoid Interstates whenever possible, however they can be used to get your local entourage out to the start of your sector and back from the end. Don't forget to keep your ASCs in the loop.

As things begin to solidify...

Tease Jaguar owners with your plans. Ace webmaster Pascal Gademer has individual pages for SCs to enter information about their Sectors. Remember that you are designing the sector for a local audience, but on your sector page you are playing to an international one. Your goal is to make the sector sound so interesting and enticing that entrants will kick themselves if they miss it. You and your ASCs want to start talking it up enthusiastically at club meetings and get it posted in the local newsletter and on your club website. As you work toward the final route, keep the club informed of your progress. They'll feel a part of it and turn out.

Detail Time

You may be cringing that this is where the hard work begins, but for my ASC and I, it really didn't seem that bad. This part is pretty universal, so I'll explain what we did in 2004 and you can use that as a template.

Applying the strategy. We had a bunch of ideas, a time frame, and a start and an end. I wanted to stop at Four Corners National Monument, not so much for the ability to stand in four states at the same time, but because they have a lot of Native American jewelry for sale. Even local folks rarely travel to the reservation and have the opportunity to purchase souvenirs direct from the craftspeople. Dick Hile, ASC, indicated that we had to drive into Utah, down through Monument Valley and eat at the historic Goulding Trading Post. He lives in Page, AZ, so arranging for dinner and a lodging there was easy for him. (Plus, I've concluded he knows everyone in Northern Arizona.) The next stop was the Grand Canyon. While one might assume that this kind of bucks the rule that you should design the route for the locals and everyone in Arizona has seen the Grand Canyon, it is about 250 miles from Phoenix, our home city and coming in from the East as we did, is not the way Phoenicians would normally get there. The last two days of the sector were pre-arranged. When I first volunteered for the sector, I proposed that we would join the Route 66 Fun Run on longest continuous stretch of the the Mother Road from Seligman (Saturday) to Kingman (overnight) to Topock, AZ. That pegged my sector to the last week in April.

Trip software: What's works and how to use it. Trip or Map software is available on-line for free. Is it worth it? Perhaps early on, but as you work with any of the packages, you will find serious limitations. I gave each of six of the big names a try. Mapquest, Mapblast, Google Maps, and Yahoo Maps all work very well at showing you streets, highways, and places of interest. My favoirite for readibility and really impressive satellite views of the country is Google Maps. It's in beta right now, so some of the route directions are a bit bizarre. The problem they all have is that they assume that you want to get from point A to point B either by the shortest time or as direct as possible avoiding certain types of roads. Direct is not necessarily our goal and getting one of these programs to take a round about route involves the tedious creation of shorter segments to force the software you way. Then you have to take the segments and re-edit them back together into a coherent trip. The fifth one I checked, Rand McNally, was the best of the freebies. It allows you to enter a limited number of intermediate points but you have to know an address, intersection, or latitude and longitude to place the point. You can "drive" the map to find an intersection, but occasionally you need to place an intermediate point along an unbroken stretch of road. If you have some of the other maps I mentioned earlier, you can use that lat. and long. from those to get close then tweak the numbers to know addresses, this will give you a list of directions with maps that you won't have to recompile. If you are a AAA or CAA member, their TripTik program is probably the easiest of the online bunch. It allows you to enter a start, stop, and up to 11 intermediate points (3 if you aren't a member) by address, city, or you can select a point of interest, attraction, restaurant, lodging, etc. from a decent, but not all-encompassing list. Unfortunately, TripTik doesn't allow for latitude and longitude, so you if you don't have an address to route your route along a certain route, you can't prevent it from taking it's own route. The general drawback to all the online trip software is that you are using them through a browser. Therefore, you are limited to browser options in the windows. One alternative is to buy some mapping/trip software. Being loaded on your PC, gives trip software a huge advantage. While I was willing to check out the major trip sites and compare software, I'm not willing to download a bunch of stuff on my PC to review it. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know and I'll add them here. I use Microsoft MapPoint 2004. Don't even look at the price. It's for integrating data with regions, tracking delivery routes, and all kinds of fancy stuff that we don't need. Fortunately, Microsoft has a little-brother version of the program that, based on my conversations with people who have used it, seems to work exactly the same way. Microsoft Streets and Trips retails for $40 but with a little shopping and rebates you can pick it up for half that. Streets and Trips and a couple of the online services track major construction projects and indicate them on your maps, however most of the shortcomings of the online software are eliminated with Streets and Trips. For example, if your route doesn't take you the way you want, you can right click on an intermediate point and select it. It will give you the option to add the point to your route. Shuffle it to the right spot in the order, recreate the directions, and see if the road follows where you lead. If you take a look at the maps for the 2004 Arizona Sector, you'll notice numbers on the road in the middle of nowhere. Those are the points needed to put the route where I wanted it. When you view the route directions, you'll see one of the drawbacks of Streets and Maps. It's excruciatingly detailed. I don't know how many people need to be told to turn onto an entrance ramp, then enter the Interstate a tenth of a mile later. As with most of the others, they also are verbose when numbered routes pass through towns. They list every street name change in the directions, which means that when you drive straight through a small town, there are two directions, one telling you the route now has a street name and another telling you it doesn't anymore. Those points that you entered to follow a route -- the directions indicate those, too. So that I don't have 30 directions where I only need fifteen, it's a simple matter to paste the Streets and Trips directions into Excel where you can edit out the extraneous lines. Note that there are mileages on the right and things won't add up unless you make a formula or grab a calculator and add up the lines you are deleting with the one that stayed. (You'll see what I mean.) If you're really adventurous, try pasting the maps into Excel. Streets and Trips also tracks time. It lets you enter stops and set durations for them. This makes it a lot easier to determine how long the day will be, however another problem creeps in here. Streets and Trips has configurable speeds for four types of roads: local, arterial, highways, and limited access. It uses some convention to define the roads and then applies the speed. The speed may not be realistic. It appears that online trip software has the actual speed limits (or perhaps just very conservative speeds) of the roads programmed in. If timing is critical, it is imperative that you double-check the duration with one or more of the online services and use the slowest one of the bunch.

If you look at a map of Arizona, there aren't a lot of alternate routes, so the sector sort of drew itself.

Working with the connecting SCs.

During this time, we were in contact with Robert MacLeay, Colorado SC, to the east and Hazel Beck, San Diego SC, to the West. We arranged for handoffs at Mesa Verde National Park, where Robert had planned a full day, and at Lake Havasu City, where Hazel planned to meet us Sunday late afternoon.

Back to the maps. With two Arizona atlases, fold out maps of Arizona and Colorado, and Microsoft MapPoint 2004 (big brother to MS Streets and Trips, but for what this entails, functionally equivalent) loaded on the PC, I started planning the route. The first day had me worried. It was 296 miles if we stayed in Page. The second day was only about 180. MapPoint listed a hotel in Kayenta, AZ, which would have equalized the segments, but an online rating service gave it only two stars. I e-mailed Dick and he advised against it, so Page it was.

Day Two needed to get us somewhere near the start of the Route 66 Fun Run. (I know I'm throwing out place names, here, not to confuse, but to reveal my thinking as I put the route together.) Again, I relied on Mr. Northern Arizona for his knowledge of everything, and he informed me that Seligman was not a place we wanted to stay. The newest hotel in town was at least 40 years old, dating back to before the city was bypassed by the Interstate. He didn't have any suggestions for that vicinity or Kingman.

Plan on driving large sections of the Route. I relied on MapPoint to a point. Dick Hile indicated that everything was OK at his end. There were large stretches without a lot of options, so I could follow the directions on a map to make sure they worked. However, I discovered that the MapPoint depiction the road into Page was wrong. When I sent the preliminary maps to Dick, he noted that the location of the hotel wasn't correct. I had to manually place it on the map to get the correct directions and use a different map to show the roads correctly. (In the route directions, you'll notice a different map for Page.) It took a few e-mails back and forth to sort that out.

Another bit of confusion arose in Kingman. I wanted to take as much of Route 66 as possible, but it was difficult to tell from the map which streets to take. I also needed to figure out where we were staying Friday and Saturday nights. It was time for a drive.

My wife and I, with the MapPoint directions in hand, headed out from Phoenix and picked up the route where the road from the Grand Canyon hit I-40 at Williams. In Williams, we found a quaint a little place with about 20 stone cabins and a couple cabooses and a Pullman car out front. The rates were very reasonable, so I had lodging for Friday night.

From there we took Route 66 to Kingman and decided on a new Holiday Inn Express. Then we followed the route to Lake Havasu City and the locals' link home and updated the directions.

Knowing that the route is correct removes a tremendous source of worry.

Food and Lodging: You'll have an idea where you need to stop, and you might have some places in mind. As you are traveling around your sector, scope out restaurants and lodging. Don't make reservations or book rooms; that gets things too complicated. Add the places to your route maps and directions. If they have website links, those are good to add to your documentation. You can offer alternate suggestions if you'd like, but it's not required.

Participant Participation. Going back to the original KISS theory of JONAT, you let the participants print out their own maps. You generate the files to allow them to do that, post them to the JONAT section of the JCNA website and direct them there. You may decide to print out a couple copies and bring them to the sector start, in case someone forgets theirs, but that's only if you're nice.

Creating Downloadable Maps

There are details about creating the maps themselves in the sidebar, but once you have them, the best thing to do is paste them, along with the directions you've generated, into some kind of page layout program. An overview map is good as a cover page, then you'll want to create smaller maps that show detail to which you can add the directions. You can use any desktop publishing or word processing program that allows you to add pictures to your text. If you have Adobe Acrobat, that's probably the ideal program, because your ultimate goal is to end up with PDF files. However, Acrobat is quite pricy and this may be the only time most of you will need it.

There are free alternatives. I downloaded a free PDF creation program called CutePDF. CutePDF installs on your computer as a printer. You layout your route maps in whatever program you feel comfortable with. When you have it done, you choose CutePDF as your printer. It prompts you for a file name and generates a PDF file from your document. Pretty slick, eh?

For ease of use on the road, it's best to have the maps and the directions for those maps on the same page. Here's how the 2004 Arizona maps turned out. If anyone has any questions about taking your ideas and getting them on the JONAT pages at www.jcna.com, e-mail me. I'll have more information on this as I get it from Pascal.

If you want to get fancy and have clickable links, on your sector webpage, Word, Excel, and probably a few other programs allow you to save your file as HTML. If you do that, open it up in a browser to make sure it looks OK, and then e-mail it to Pascal. He'll paste it into your page on jcna.com. I discovered that if you set the maps and directions up as different spreadsheets in an Excel workbook, your HTML output will be in the form of tabbed web pages. Check the 2004 Arizona Route details for an example.

Getting People into their Jaguars and onto the Street

The biggest thing you want to create for your sector is interest. You can do that either pulling some PR photos from the local department of tourism. (Make sure they aren't copyrighted and if they are, get permission before using them.) Or, take pictures while you are driving your route. Describe your sector in glowing terms and list the fin and exciting things you have planned. Include those pictures. As with the maps, you can edit all of this in Word or another word processor and save the information as HTML. Again, make sure you check it before you forward it to Pascal.

Publicity is an optional thing, but some SCs had good success with it in 2004. If you look at the big picture, one of the reasons for the tour, besides getting out and having fun, is to publicize Jaguar and JCNA. As far as I know, no other marque club is doing anything like this, so it is a newsworthy event. Small town papers are always looking for interesting local news and this could be one of the highlights of the year for them. In metropolitan areas, large papers often have an car section. At the very least you can let them know that JONAT is coming through and if you'll be someplace at a certain time, they'll probably put it in their events schedule. If you have a lot of cars and some are unusual, you might even interest TV stations into videoing and interviewing. If you have the time and the helpers, call all the media outlets in all the areas you'll pass through.

Final Preparations

A month out: It's a good idea to call everyone who has registered for your sector to make sure they are still coming. On something of this scale, there are always a couple people who have something come up. You don't want to be waiting at the handoff for someone who isn't going to show. Get things like cell phone numbers which will be very handy if you lose someone on the road.

The JONAT site will indicate who's paid. Remind those who haven't to do so. Let them know that participants who have pre-registered and pre-paid far enough in advance will have their bonnet badges and route book covers mailed to you for distribution at the start of their tour. We'll mail you a few extras, but late and day-of registrants won't be guaranteed their goodies and will have to pay $10 shipping and handling to have them mailed directly to them.

A week out: Make a check with the local authorities for last minute road information. State highway and county and city road and street departments should have information about construction or repairs. Adjust the route if necessary.

A couple days out: Print out all the registration information for all the participants and put it with the stuff you're taking along.

Paperwork: The only paperwork of the tour, is keeping track of the extra goodies. We'll start with a few extra at the beginning and replenish the extras as we go along. We'll have an inventory sheet for each of you. At the handoff points, you and the next SC will sign that the quantities passed along are correct and return the form to us. Make sure none of the goodies walk away, because we are running JONAT based on cost and we don't have much of a margin of error. If items are lost on your segment, you'll be responsible for paying for them. That's the only stern warning of the tour.

There you have it. The hard part's done. Now get behind the wheel and enjoy the tour.