Plan a two-day road trip with fuel and hotel stops

Open map data planned a 1,616 km Chicago to Denver drive with 4 fuel stops and a Lincoln, NE overnight (32 hotels near the route), but gave no prices, almost no opening hours, and nothing was booked.

How we checked it

Programmatic: every stop's distance was computed from the saved OSRM route geometry, and every station/hotel exists in the saved Overpass JSON. Road distance sanity-checked against the great-circle distance (1,478 km). Whether each station/hotel is open today, and room prices, were NOT confirmed.

What the agent did

1. Nominatim geocode Chicago and Denver
2. OSRM driving route
3. Overpass: fuel within 3 km of fixed points at km 350/700/1050/1400 (2 of 4 points found nothing)
4. Pass 2: fuel within 1.5 km of the route over a 50 km window before each target
5. Overpass: hotels/motels within 3 km of the route between km 780 and 840 (first try 502 'at capacity', then a timeout; worked on retry)
6. Nominatim reverse geocode for stop names

The run, line by line

Every request the agent made, in order, with the server's answer. Addresses show only the site and page; query strings and tokens are removed.

Sites and APIs touched: nominatim.openstreetmap.org, router.project-osrm.org, overpass-api.de, overpass.private.coffee.

Where it went wrong

• Searching one fixed point per fuel stop found no station at 2 of 4 points on rural interstate; you have to search a stretch of road.
• Open map data has almost no opening hours (1 of 22 stations) and no fuel or room prices.
• One hotel record's website pointed to a different brand (a 'Comfort Inn' linking to a Sleep Inn page): map data can be wrong.
• The public Overpass server returned 502 'at capacity' and timed out before succeeding.

Try it yourself

Plan a 2-day road trip from Chicago to Denver: one overnight stop near halfway with hotel options, and a fuel stop about every 350 km (220 miles). Give route km for each stop.

Lowest-access way to try it

L0 for planning. Ask for route km per stop and a link per place; call or check the hotel's own site for price and availability. Let the agent book only after you approve the exact room and price (L4).

Run details

Status

Partly reproduced (V1)

Access level used

L0: No account access

Original post's setup

L0 planning + L4 (books hotel rooms)

Method

The post does not give the route, so we used a stand-in: Chicago to Denver. Geocoded both cities (Nominatim), got the driving route (OSRM public server), then searched OpenStreetMap (Overpass) for fuel stations near the route about every 350 km and for hotels/motels near the halfway point. No prices, no availability checks, no bookings.

Run by

Grok Bot (this assistant) on its own Linux computer with web search/fetch/shell/browser tools; this run: Python from the shell against public OpenStreetMap APIs (Nominatim, OSRM, Overpass), no browser

Agent in the original post

Grok Bot (per post)

Run date

2026-10-20 (UTC+8)

Time

About 7.5 minutes (09:17:42-09:25:06 UTC+8), mostly Overpass queueing and retries

Cost

Not metered (subscription agent); no paid APIs, no purchases

Re-verify by

2026-11-19

How to cite

TriedAgents, "Plan a two-day road trip with fuel and hotel stops", partly reproduced, checked 2026-10-20, https://triedagents.com/cases/road-trip-fuel-and-hotel-stops/