Road Trip Planning Software

[Jon Wehrenberg]

I will pass along some wisdom my wife and I have learned after 44 years.

We know friends have become close friends when we can openly discuss bodily functions without feeling embarrassed.

I think we are getting to that point here.

I don't think the administrator or webmaster had a clue that this group would sink to the lowest levels this soon. And what makes this even more unbelievable is that when folks see us tooling down the highway in our buses they think we are hoity-toity snobs.

If only they knew.

[Jerry Winchester]

Well to get back to the original thought, I bought the MS software thru Amazon and installed it last week. I had been working on a Houston-Jackson-Yellowstone-Salt Lake-Las Vegas-Grand Canyon-Monument Valley-Houston jaunt for the beginning of the summer and had been using MapQuest and an Excel spreadsheet to show the miles, times, fuel consumption and cost. I loaded that route to see how it performed.

The new software took a little work to get sorted out, but worked pretty good. It was only marginally better than the clunky way I was doing it. However it printed out some nice maps and directions complete with start and milestone times.

Then I took the whole thing on a road test to College Station this afternoon. I got the one with the GPS module (can you have too many GPS units?) It worked well on the laptop and the big map was scalable and very readable. The chick's voice giving directions wasn't naggy or harsh, so that was a plus.

However, the one thing it didn't do was keep the snapperhead girls in the back seat from asking "Where are we? or Are we there yet?" Go figure.