The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is where our Outer Banks convoy comes apart every June. It’s the same crew and the same rental house each year, and somebody always ends up well behind by the time we reach the Virginia Beach side. I never knew exactly how it happened until the summer before last, when I opened the trip replay a few days after we got home and scrubbed through the whole drive with a notes app open next to it.
My friends found this very funny, and they have not stopped bringing it up since.
The link doesn’t wait for next year
Something I didn’t realize until I went looking: the replay link Konvoyage sends after a trip works for 30 days, and then it’s gone. That makes sense from a privacy angle (the saved location points get deleted on about the same schedule), but it changes how you use a replay for planning. You can’t pull up last June’s drive in May. Whatever you want to learn from it, you have to write down while the link still works.
My notes file, titled “OBX drive, things to fix,” turned into the plan for the following June, and the replay is where all of it came from.
What I wrote down
The gas stop in Elizabeth City was the first entry. That station has four pumps and we had more cars than that, so someone always waits, and whoever finishes first drifts into the store for snacks, and then the people who waited go in too. In the replay, the drive is playing along at speed when the dots freeze and a label pops up at the top of the map: “Stopped · 26m.” Twenty-six minutes, for fuel. I’d have guessed it was a quick stop if anyone had asked me, and I was the person who organized it.
What I find interesting is how the replay decides that a group is stopped at all. A phone reports a slightly different position every few seconds even when it’s sitting in a cup holder, because GPS error wanders as satellites move and signals bounce off buildings, so if you added up every tiny hop you’d conclude that a parked car had driven a fair distance. The replay doesn’t add up those hops at all. It compares where each person is with where they were roughly three minutes earlier or later, and only counts them as moving if the net change is more than 250 meters. Shuffling a car from the pump to a parking spot doesn’t come close, which is why our gas stop showed up as one clean block of standing still instead of a jittery mess of dots. It also only skips ahead when nobody in the trip is moving, so if a car had left early to get a head start, the clock would have kept running for everyone.
The bridge-tunnel was the second entry, and the more useful one. Watching it back, you can see the convoy spread out over the water as people slow down by different amounts for the tunnel sections, and by the time the lead car reached land, the last car was still underground. My cousin Dev slows right down in tunnels, which is fine, but nobody behind him knew to expect it, and the gap opened up behind him every single time.
There’s another line in the file that just says “lunch??” and I can’t remember what I meant by it.
Turning the notes into a plan
I asked everyone to fill up before leaving home and picked a bigger station further down the road for whoever still needed it. On the morning of the drive I messaged the group about the tunnels: right lane, posted limit. Dev got the lead car, since the convoy can only go as fast as he does in there anyway.
We had a couple of new people last summer, a friend’s boyfriend and a college roommate making a comeback appearance. The old replay was long gone by the time they signed up, so they got a screenshot of my notes and a message telling them to stay behind Dev. After that drive I shared the new replay with my brother-in-law, who says every summer that he’ll come next time, so he could see what the day actually looks like before the link expires.
Yes, they still call me the convoy project manager
When I told the group I’d “reviewed last year’s replay and made some changes,” the roasting started before I finished the sentence. Someone named me the convoy project manager on the spot and asked if I had built a spreadsheet. I hadn’t, though the notes file does have headings. The drive went noticeably smoother anyway. Nobody went into the store at the gas stop, and in the new replay the convoy crosses the bridge-tunnel bunched up behind Dev the whole way over.
I did the same thing with last summer’s replay before that link ran out, so the plan for next June is mostly written already. If you could watch your own group’s last drive back at high speed, which stop would you want to time first?