Hittin' the Books

In the old days, before the online maps and the ability to look up anything and any place, I used the Rand McNally U.S. Road Atlas and checked all the little red boxes to find places to go. Later on, over the years, I would find the little red boxes, the attractions, and look them up on the Web. I do a lot of my road trip research on the Web now, but I still like to get out the atlas, and if it's an old one, I go ahead and use a highlighter and mark the route and then go through and find all those red squares, and make a list, and Google them, see which ones look good. Benjamin's finally old enough to help now, to play maps with me. He has the patience of a five year old, but he gets excited when we find anything with the word "park", "magic", or "dinosaur" in it. He reads the letters of the fine print of the attraction names that my eyes can't read anymore, and I tell him what it says.
Lately, on my own, I've been looking into Clarksdale, Mississippi where Hwy 61 crosses Hwy 49, the crossroads where Robert Johnson took his guitar down and had it tuned by the devil. I would like to see that, maybe take a pencil down there and get the devil to sharpen it for me or adjust some settings on my camera. So, I've Googled it and Google Mapped it, and I've seen pictures of a sign there at the crossroads, but I'm still not sure where it is on the map, still working on that. I would just rather not drive all over Clarksdale looking for it, and every time I look up anything about Clarksdale, I wind up with that song, Last Train to Clarksville, stuck in my head.
A lot of the red squares in the Rand McNally are race tracks, golf courses, civic centers, city halls, and colleges, so we go through (Benjamin and I) , along the route that I've done using mainly interstates, looking around 30 to 40 miles out from the route (maybe more if something looks really interesting) and find anything that looks good. So far on our list to Google (I'm waiting on him while he plays Zoo Tycoon) are:

• Underground Atlanta
• Chickasaw Village on Hwy 78 in Mississippi
• Natural Bridge, De Soto Caverns Park, and Moundville Archeological Park in Alabama
• Birmingham Zoo, Magic Adventure Theme Park, Statue of Liberty, and Vulcan Statue in Birmingham

We're also needing to sit down with a calendar and figure out when we can do this.
And then I put anything we decide on into my ancient version of Rand McNally Tripmaker and get the mileage and the times.
Maybe more tonight...