It's well known that men won't stop and ask for directions, preferring to drive around and use dead reckoning until we either find the place or our bluff is called by the woman riding shotgun, whichever comes first. Thanks to computers and networks, it's possible for the modern hero to check out the lay of the land before he goes, then drive unerringly to places he has never seen before.

Today, we'll talk about software for use with a Global Positioning System (GPS), and later, in part 3, about how to use them together.

What Is It?
Trip planning software gives you the capability to indicate the beginning, end, and stopping points in your itinerary. Specify your preferences for types of routes, such as interstates, toll roads, and the like, and your preferred speed, frequency of breaks, start and end times each day, and the like. Then plan your trip to a very detailed level. These programs can tell you what time you will arrive at each waypoint, and when you will need to buy gasoline. They contain maps of varying detail, with your route highlighted. You can zoom in and out, from the street level to the state level. And they can tell you where the restaurants, libraries, hotels, gas stations, and museums, and courthouses are.

Name Two of Them
Actually, I've taken a look at three of them: Microsoft Streets and Trips 2001, Rand McNally TripMaker Deluxe 2001, and DeLorme (duh - lor - um) Map-N-G0 6.0. The prices of these programs vary widely from time to time, and there are often rebate programs as well, but generally they cost roughly $50. I managed to find Map-N-Go for $9.99, and at that price its value really stands out. Streets and Trips has the option of copying about 600 megabytes of maps to your hard drive, the others often require the CD to display detailed maps. Outside of the major cities, TripMaker has very little detail.

When It Works, What Does It Do?
The primary use of these programs is planning your trip. You can estimate days, time, and dollars. TripMaker will let you define a trip segment as a plane trip. You can also mark up maps, showing your house, your parents' or children's homes, and other sites of interest to you, by adding push pins or text boxes. They use the Internet to retrieve construction information and mark it on the map.

All three programs will download a map to a handheld computer. TripMaker and Map-N-Go make maps for the Palm Pilot. Streets and Trips makes maps for the Pocket PC and other Windows CE devices. They apparently aren't happy having your money for Streets and Trips, the Evil Empire wants you to buy a handheld operating system, too, or you just can't have a little map.

Maps. Did I say maps? Maps are the best part of trip planners. You want to know where to get off the subway nearest your niece's Manhattan apartment? You want to find the Avis Rental Return place in Kansas City? You want to find your address when you were a kid? As much as I dislike their business practices, I think that Streets and Trips finds addresses better than the others.

They also find Points of Interest - restaurants and gas stations, libraries, train stations and airports. It seems that the hotel names are out of date - this feature is not generally reliable. I wonder whether, if they can get construction information from the net, they might someday get the Points of Interest information from the Web, where it might be more current.

There is a lot of difference in the GPS interface of these programs. TripMaker has a Kids view that is fun. Also, it will display how many miles and hours it will take to reach your destination. Map-N-Go has a speech function that tells you when to turn.

What's the Down Side?
These are great tools, but to my knowledge, you can't make them interact with any genealogy program that I know of. I would like to be able to mark a point on a map and somehow link it to a place in my database, and store the link. We'll see a worse case of this next time when we talk about using the GPS with these programs for genealogy purposes.

Also, the feature set is not mature. The Palm and The Car don't mix. It is dangerous to try to read a laptop (or a map, for that matter) while driving a car. With the Palm Pilot versions of the TripMaker maps, I found that I was either zoomed out so far that I couldn't see enough detail, or I was zoomed in so close that by the time I saw something on the map, I had driven past it. A three-inch display was not meant for real-time navigation by the pilot.

I should add that the Palm and GPS are great for walking tours - as long as the maps are fairly small. The downloaded map can contain all of the information about restaurants and sights in a city. You can place a marker where you parked your car to help find it later - assuming that it's outdoors where the GPS works. A map of Dallas-Fort Worth was too big to download to my 8MB Palm Vx. You'd have to experiment to keep them under 500k bytes, but that's much larger than you'll need to map a cemetery.

How Do I Know If It's Not Working?
I've had Streets and Trips 2002 blow up on me when I try to find an address. I've also had difficulty placing pushpins in that program. My advice is to stick with the 2001 version until about Christmas.

What's the Genealogy Tie-In?
Locating graves, ancestral homesites, and repositories for starters. I've found Web sites with GPS coordinates for graves. Still, the bigger savings is not getting lost. There is the tangible savings of time, miles, and expensive gasoline, as well as the intangible but real benefit that you can be dependable when you're driving a woman somewhere. Being dependable is a big deal and a tool that helps you with that is worthy of consideration. Women, most often, are already dependable and don't need help in this respect.

Link Me Up (More Stars is Better)

Travel Planning Software Reviews **** Zd Inc, Bruce and Marge Brown, 17 November 2000, 14 August 2001. www.zdnet.com/products/stories/specs/0,8828,258122,00.html
A review of Microsoft Expedia Streets and Trips, with links to similar product reviews.

Current versions of products discussed here: |
www.microsoft.com/streets/
www.delorme.com/mapngo/
www.randmcnally.com/rmc/store/strProductDetail.jsp?OID=1073802590&POID=-1073749865

What Else?
Planning is important, regardless of the tool that you use. Whether you use a map or you use a computer, my grandmother used to say, an ounce of planning is worth a pound of excuses. Know the basic layout of the places you plan to visit before you go. It turns out that there is a park -- a facsimile of Beijing's Forbidden City, about three miles from my parents' house in Katy, TX. I would not have known if I hadn't used these programs.

I wish they would tell you when you'll reach cities above a certain size. The directions say things like, "Go south on I-45 for 219 miles." I once planned a trip from Ft Worth to Kansas City, and it would have been nice to know when I was going to reach Oklahoma City, or Wichita. These things aren't in the directions, and I had to schedule a stop zero minutes long to find out what time I'd be reaching those two tourist spots.

Many people like Internet travel planners, such as MapQuest. I like them too. It's easy to print driving directions, but only from one point to another. You can't specify a trip to multiple destinations. And if you print a map and take it with you, you won't be able to see when you're off course, the way that you can when you monitor a GPS.

Beau Sharbrough is the president of GENTECH, the founder of the GENTECH and FGS Web sites, and a founder of the Lexicon Working Group. He would like to hear from you at beau@sharbrough.net, but due to the volume of e-mail received, he is unable to answer every e-mail message received. Please note that he cannot assist you with your individual computer or genealogy problems. Visit Beau's Web site (http://www.sharbrough.net/) for links to related articles. Beau is the father of two college girls and is a proud graduate of Texas A&M University.