Map’n’Go

 I love to tour the country on my Honda Goldwing and have used the planners for years. Now I can do it myself with Map’n’Go™, the complete travel planner for North America from Delorme, makers of the best-selling Street Atlas USA® 3.0 and Phone Search USA™. Map’n’Go includes a CD-ROM and a 128 page companion atlas.

 The features are impressive and make your trip planning a breeze. You can plan, route and print your planner with ease. Noted features are:

• Seamless, full color maps of the US, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.
• 128-page companion paper atlas, cross-referenced by screen grids.
• Routing software capable of calculating, quickest, shortest or preferred
• routes.
• 26,000 hotels, inns and campgrounds with contact and amenities information.
• Thousands of pictures and narrated descriptions of points of interest.
• Locations by zip codes, phone numbers and place names.
• ·Ability to change the map scale.
• Detailed city maps with corresponding pages in the paper atlas.
• Ability to print maps and travel plan maps with printed directions.
• State boundaries, cities, towns, lakes, ponds, streams and rivers.

 Installation was a breeze requiring only two clicks, one to run the setup from program manager and one to accept the suggested directory name. It creates a new program group so power users should make sure they have room for another group to be added. Once installed, I ran the demo tutorial for a quick training session, then I went to work.

 To test it out, I decided to plan a jaunt from my home to Leakey, TX and back. I planned to stay off major highways to take the scenic route, a practice preferred when motorcycle touring. The entire process was point and click. On each point along the way I was able to view slides and narration of various points of interest I would be visiting. For my planned trip there was Guadalupe River State Park, (my picnic spot), and Natural Bridge Caverns. I planned to stop by the Medina Country Store for some of their fresh apple pie and ice cream and then overnight at Lost Maples near Vanderpool. Neither of those two were listed, but then I wonder how many San Antonians are aware of those two treasures.

 Then I was back off to Leakey along Ranch Road 337 (one of my favorite rides). After a short break the next stop would be down to Garner State Park along Highway 83, then wandering back along the Sabinal River to Utopia, back via Tarpley to Bandera and Pipe Creek, and finally to San Antonio.

 San Antonio is well represented with slides and narration on the River Walk, the Alamo, Sea World and the Missions as well as several local restaurants. I chose the Anaqua Grill at 555 S. Alamo Street as my last meal before hitting home.

Mapping it and printing the travel plan took only a few clicks and a very slick professional 8 page route with stops and travel times at my readjusted biking speed was in my hands. The online help and tutorial is comprehensive to the point I never needed printed documentation or tech support.

Overall, I was very impressed with the scope of the application. In addition to creating one’s own custom trip planners, one can use it as their own interactive “travel channel” to visit any place in North America. It is a wonderful tool to teach your children direction, geography, and show them a lot of the cultural diversity on this continent. The CD-ROM includes their complete catalog with point and click interactive demos of Street Atlas, Map Expert and Global Explorer.

 The cost of this jewel is only $39, (not a misprint, that’s only thirty-nine dollars), available direct from Delorme at 1-800-452-5931, ext. 627 or via their web site at http://www.delorme.com Now that I have a feel for how easy it is to do, I’m going to be busy planning my summer tour to Alaska!

 Microsoft asks Where do you want to go today?, but once you leave the hype and fantasy of cyberspace and get back into the real world, it is Delorme’s Map’n’Go that lets you plan it, route it, map it and go.