Road Trip Application(s)?

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xz87zg

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Oct 31, 2005
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We are going 1300 miles at the end of the month from home to Florida.  I'd really appreciate being able to plug  the start and end points into a program, plus how many days we want to take, and have the application not just map the route (with mile markers, etc.), how fast we expect to drive, and have it tell me roughly where to spend the nights.  Listing the lodgings available in the stop-over locales would be a plus.  Mapquest, et al. seem to demand that I decide in advance where I want to stop and tell the software where I intend to stop (fine, for those who already know the areas).

Any suggestions?

D
 
Street Atlas USA from DeLorme has trip planning where you specify either the number of hours or miles/day that you want to travel and it will show suggested stopping points.  You can also program fuel stops the same way.  Zooming in on the area around a suggested stop will show the various points of interest but the database is far from complete.
 
My favorite trip planner by far is Microsoft Map Point  Not the trips and streets version but the full blown real deal.  Its a bit on the spendy side at $225 or so but the detail and trip customization are awesome.  I was going to try to come up with a less expensive alternative but for me there just isn't one.

All of my trips are done in Map Point.

Jeff Brown
 
I have a Garmin GPS and the Garmin Map Source program for the computer. I download waypoints for campgrounds and Walmarts and then go in and delete all the waypoints that are not close to the route planned to get to where I am going. I then decide how many miles (approx) that I want to drive  (on a daily basis) and look for a place to stay in the general vicinity that my mileage calculation will get me to.  We usually don't drive more than 500+ miles in a day, but this is subjected to how you personally feel. DW will share a small amount of driving but I do most of it. My Garmin will display gas stations and campgrounds along the way and I would guess the other GPS units do too.

I also check the planned route on the AAA website to see if any construction is prevalent along the route (you don't need to be a AAA member to use the mapping including making a printout of their route map). The AAA website not only gives you the route with the construction information and campgrounds too, but if you zoom in on the planned route to points where you suspect you will need to get fuel you can click on the gas stations and it will tell you what the prevailing prices are (usually posted within a day or so of the date of the search). I also have web site that you can go to for gas prices in almost any city in the country http://www.detroitgasprices.com/index.aspx?s=Y&fuel=A&area=All%20Areas&station=All%20Stations&tme_limit=24. This is for detroit but you can input whatever state/city you want for the most recent fuel prices.
 
As a photographer, I plan my trips the other way around. I research destinations, and then plan a route to optimize the number of destinations and minimize travel times. This is difficult, because circumstances can change during the trip.

My main problem is easily maintaining a library of POIs for my destinations. I wonder how various software options work with selecting and ordering subsets of waypoints, pois, or whatever. I wish rather than specifying way POINTS I could specify way ROADS. Have you ever tried to get mapping software to follow a scenic drive? As far as that goes, I wish the way "points" would feature scenic drives as well.


 
Greg,
That's essentially what we do. The Wife plans the destinations (mostly) and then I do the route planning to get there. We normally are not looking for scenic routes but rather the easiest ways to get there. I will try to avoid toll roads (if I can) but for us it is usually the destination and not the route that has the priority.
 
Of course, I should have said that I have Macs.  Apparently DeLorme has abandoned the Mac side entirely.

Thanks,

D
 
No, it is a trip planning tool listed on their web site.    http://goodsams.com/ 
 
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