
Is there nothing Google can’t do? Courtesy of a site with the somewhat spammy name of Free Map Tools.com I have put together a map that draws a circle with a 50-mile radius from the town where I live (Wilmington, MA). Starting this week, my goal is to visit a different place somewhere in this circle one day a week and blog about my little adventure.
There’s not a lot of close-up detail on the map I’ve posted at the top, but you can see that the circle ranges from Concord, NH in the northwest to Plymouth, MA in the southeast. It goes from York, ME in the northeast to just short of Sturbridge, MA in the southwest. Worcester, MA, Manchester, NH, and Pawtucket, RI are also in this radius, and if I stretch it to 60 miles it adds Providence, RI, Sanford, ME and reaches into the southeastern-most tip of Vermont. In other words, there should be plenty of places to visit.
Here’s a larger map of the northern half of the circle so you can see more detail. And here’s the southern half.
For my inaugural Road Trip, I have chosen Concord, New Hampshire as my destination. My plan is to go on Wednesday of this week and post about my adventure on Friday. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, I will aim to do a little Johnny-on-the-spot posting via Twitter as I encounter WiFi hotspots (NOTE: I don’t crosspost between Twitter and Facebook, so FB-only users are out of luck). I’m really looking forward to seeing what I can come up with.
Next week, I would like to visit the opposite end of the circle. Most of the South Shore is Terra Incognita to me, so it will be a good deal more exploratory, I think. For next week’s trip, I am willing to let all of you choose the destination. Here are the choices:
(direct link to poll for people reading via RSS, or in case there’s a problem with the javascript version )
The poll will remain open until 11:59 p.m. Sunday, April 19.
If you have suggestions of places for me to visit in Concord, or if you’d like to make requests of certain destinations for future Road Trips, feel free to post them as comments here.

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I said Plymouth, because I’m original that way. I’d also like to see you hit Maine. Hell, I’d like to see ME hit both Plymouth and Maine (and Concord, for all that). Despite being an East Coastie, I’m from the Philadelphia area and never made it north of West Point.
Trivia: I lived in Wilmington, Delaware and my oldest kid was born there. Places named Wilmington rock.
If you go to Pawtucket you can visit some of my friends at Hasbro.
Even if I don’t go to Pawtucket next week, I will get there sooner or later. When it does get picked, I’ll ping you to see if I can get to visit Hasbro. That would be a great thing to do! Thanks, Marty!
i vote for another visit to those nice carbon-fiber-cello people at luis & clark…
He was a fascinating guy, and I really enjoyed my visit with them. I knew absolutely nothing about cellos when I showed up at their door, but I was fascinated with his instruments.
If you go to Pawtucket you might be able to visit the field where the PawSox play.