Travel Planner

[daveinfl]

I am looking for a really good travel planner. Maybe my expectations are to high. I'm looking for something that can do the following.

1. Allow you to input your entire route. For example, starting point Orlando, Florida with main stops Colorado Springs, Toledo Ohio, Cooperstown New York, Washington DC and back home to Orlando.
2. Allow me to input a maximum number of hours I would like to drive each day.
3. Suggest stopping points.
4. Suggest campgrounds.
5. Suggest nearby sights to see.
6. Provide a fuel planner.
7. Print maps.

Of course I can do this taking several hours to research the entire route .... but it seems like something must be out there that might do this. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Dave

[ELM-JLM]

Microsoft Streets & Trips has worked well for us!

[scrubjaysnest]

Delorme Street Atlas will also work. We prefer to work with Mapsource, down load coords for CG's from the internet. Work everything out on the laptop. Then verify with Google Earth. When done up load to our Garmin gps. I spend about an hour per evening from Nov through Feb getting our trip laid out for 6 to 8 months of travel.

You might also look at Google Maps on line also.

If you find one source that does everything on your list, let us know. My experience is it is a combination of resources, gps ( and by the way my daughters much cheaper Tom Tom is as helpful as my much more expensive Garmin), paper atlas or maps, aaa tour books, other tour books by Frommer's, Lonely Planet etc., stopping at Welcome Centers can also provide a wealth of local info and sometime valuable discounts and this and other forums.
My Mom always said planning the trip was half the fun...?

[scrubjaysnest]

+1 for moaboy on the paper maps. We always get a new atlas and mark our routes on it. We have a box set aside for paper maps. Has NF's and BLM paper maps for the areas we will be in.

[Bill]

Dave -

My wife is a map hound and a truly excellent travel planner. She plans every one of our coast-to-coast trips, and would not even think of using an automated planner. A month or so in advance, she begins by choosing some sights we have never seen before, and a major route (Gulf Coast? Great Plains? Northern Corridor?) that will accomodate them. Fire up Google Maps (it has a wonderful multi-point mapping capability), get out the Big Book of Camgrounds, and start reading about destinations. Texas Hill Country? New Orleans? World's Largest Ball of Twine?

It is an iterative process involving all of those things, plus deciding on a reasonable number of miles to drive each day. And it finally ends up with a list of campgrounds. All of this gets printed out on several sheets of paper to go with us. The secret, she tells me, is not to get too wedded to that sheet of paper. Use it as guidance, but be prepared to go with the flow. Don't make paid campground reservations in advance, for example. That way if the Ball of String is closed, or we come across an unexpected treat (last year in Utah we spotted a sign for the Golden Spike National Monument and did a six-hour detour to explore it), or find a beautiful but unexpected campground, we are not committed to anything.

This works for us, especially on long lesiurely trips. Short weekend trips, or trips to Yellowstone or Disney, for example, where early campground reservations are a must, are different. But the idea of a push-button planner isn't nearly as much fun.

Just my (our) thought.

Bill

[tentcamper]

We just use google maps to figure out the route and plan the hours of traveling. Do your FROM and your last location as the TO for the day and then click and drag the route to any way points. Print directions. We then load all the way points in our GPS before the trip, so each morning we can load that days trip.

We make a folder with all the google routes. Other information of things we might be interested to see when in route or when we arrive at the CS(s). DW wife is big in doing research of the areas we will be traveling so we also have several books of the areas we are traveling through.

With the camper we figure we travel at 75% the speed that google maps calculates.

I like bringing google directions as a backup to the GPS. One trip I had the GPS die. Oh what a pain to go back to using maps. TG for a wall-mart along the trip.

We like google because we can pull up the satellite image of the CG and if we make reservations get a better idea of the sites.