I do routes, like many of you, but I recently was blessed with a huge route of 106 shops. I am not hugely familiar where every little nook and cranny town is in my state. Do any of you have a program you use to put in multiple cities in to see where you can logically start/stop your routes? I am aware of google maps and mapquest but on those you can only do 25-26 stops at a time. I want to see everything, then plan out the address locations. I have 38 different cities I need to locate and plan for.

Just trying to make my life easier, of course. Mapquest and google maps keeps locking up. I have input 25 addresses in waaaay tooo many times! LOL

Thanks in advance if you can help.

I actually take a giant step backwards when initially planning a route. I use a state highway map to start planning routes so I can get an idea of the relative locations of each town/city. Once I have a rough route laid out, then I go to mapquest to start plotting the route.

When I'm actually out driving, I rely on my GPS to give me the shortest distances between the stops.

I would suggest you input just the town names into Mapquest, not the addresses, then see what the logical approach is to get to all the towns. Once you can see what parts of your state you will be going to, you can break it up into chunks and enter a day's worth of shops by address into a different Mapquest search. You can sign in to Mapquest and save your searches. Call one "Near home" another "Northwest," "Southeast," etc. If you're going to travel multiple days and stay overnight en route, each day will start with the prior day's stopping point.

This is what I do as well. I will look to see where all the cities are located via Google Maps, then plot out my route that way. I'll group together shops by locations that are near each other (obviously) and mess around with Google Maps to plot it out to where it makes the most sense. I love how you can click and drag the order of the locations and how it maps it out via a line for you, so you can see when you move something if it's a better plan or not.

How many days are you planning for this route?

You may find that several towns cluster together. If you see that Oakville and Elmville and Pecanville are near each other, just enter one of those names into your master map since you will likely be doing all of them on the same day anyway.

I usually do as ya'll described, but my problem is...I have too many cities to go into Mapquest/google maps to get an intial visual of where I could be going and who is close to who. I was hoping there was a cooler program out there that allows me to put more than 25 cities in.

I am going to do this route in 3 seperate days a couple days apart. I have done it once before, but was hoping for a different way to load the cities. I would use the same map as before, but I have different stopping/starting points each time because I come home then go back out.


Add: I feel like taking a print out of all the addresses to AAA and asking them to figure it out. LOL!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/26/2012 02:07AM by SecretAgentMom.

Try Rand Mcnally. It will map out a route. I am not sure how many cities you can put in at once though. I found it to be more accurate than Mapquest.

SecretAgentMom Wrote:
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> Add: I feel like taking a print out of all the
> addresses to AAA and asking them to figure it out.
> LOL!

If you are a AAA member, they will definitely do this for you. Give them a call, prior to your visit. Let them have some time to work on it. They'll have a TripTik waiting for you. Or, you can use TripTik, online, to plot your cities. I think it will allow for more than 35.

I don't know if the Harley Davison site still has a route planner or not. I also don't know if there's a limit to how many locations you can put in at once (didn't know Google had a limit either) but you might want to try that and see if they still have their route planner.

I have a simple solution. Microsoft Streets and Trips costs about $30 and is the invaluable tool for most route shoppers. You just input the list of addresses and hit the "optimize route" button. It will take a while to "chew on" 106 addresses, but will arrange them in the most efficient route. THEN, you can go to your first location (Probably your home address) and insert a departure time. It will then compute your ETA at the first stop. At that address, you can insert an estimated duration for the visit., and so on down the road. That will help you to figure out where you want to spend the night. At the last stop of that day, you can click on "find nearby places," then select "hotels" and a search radius. Select a hotel, and its address and phone number will pop up.

I always check out hotels on tripadvisor.com before making a reservation, regardless of how I am going to get my reservation. Once you have inserted the address of your hotel into the route, you can edit that to show your AM departure time from the hotel, which will then show you the ETA for your first shop of Day 2. Repeat the timing estmates proceedure, "rinse, and repeat, lol."

+1 to Streets & Trips. Well worth the $30.

I have access to a copy of MapPoint through my primary job, but Streets & Trips can handle pretty much anything even a serious route-runner can throw at it.

I do multiple route shops all the time and LOVE - MyRouteOnLine.

It is a pay service but I've only used the $4.95 service with gives you a fixed number of addresses (its over 30) like a punch card to use as you need. You can input your home address and it will give you the option to start and stop your route there. Then just list all your other addresses. Press "plan my route" and there it is. Because I only use the very basic service there are some limitations but so far it has been really great. The other good thing it that you can change the order of your shops, for instance I had one stop that had to be done first thing in the morning. I put that as my first stop and then the program adjusted the route. It is not perfect but so far it has done a great job for me. It took me about two and a half months to use up the first "punch card" of stops, so about $2.00 a month. You can pay for this service with PayPal.

I was in the middle of laying out a 26 stop route when I ran out of my first allotment, it gave me the option to pay and then keep on going with my route. I did not have to re-enter all those addresses!

You can set an estimated time for each stop and then it calculates the approximate total time for the route. It also lists total mileage and miles between stops. I've gotten so used to this program I even use it when I just have three or four stops - I am directionally challenged and this takes a lot of guess work out - well this and my GPS!!!

The map on the cheap version does not print well at all, so I just number my shop pages in the route order and then use my GPS once I am on the road.

SecretAgentMom Wrote:
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> I usually do as ya'll described, but my problem
> is...I have too many cities to go into
> Mapquest/google maps to get an intial visual of
> where I could be going and who is close to who. I
> was hoping there was a cooler program out there
> that allows me to put more than 25 cities in.
>

I have an "old-fashioned" GPS program, that is still updatable on my newish laptop. OK, I have to be out on the porch to plot my route, because the receiver gadget doesn't work inside. But it works well. It's a Garmin program from 2000, maps are still constantly updated, and they told me when I installed it on my Win 7 laptop, they had no plans of discontinuing the updates. You may be able to find an inexpensive CD on ebay or Craig's list.

It is customizable, you can save "waypoints" (the old name for favorites), you can save trips, you can zoom in and out, and there's no limit I have found in the no of cities you can plot on the map. At least we didn't last fall when we went from Northwest Washington to Central Florida via Pittsburgh and the boonies in Tennessee

PS: it's called Garmin nRoute

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/26/2012 08:52PM by Kundry.

I used to have Microsoft Streets & Tips, but it didn't work correctly on our new computer, and is now hopelessly out-of-date. We're talking 1997 version, here.

I had been using Google maps, and calculating the timing myself. I had *totally* forgotten about the feature of Streets & Tips where you can calculate your time spent at each stop, and all that! I may have to invest in the updated software.

What I want to know is how can you do 108 shops in three days ... even with a few days for reporting between the shopping days? I must be doing the wrong kind of shops! Kudos to you!

shopit Wrote:
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> What I want to know is how can you do 108 shops in
> three days ... even with a few days for reporting
> between the shopping days? I must be doing the
> wrong kind of shops! Kudos to you!


How? Well I got it down to a science. LOL. They are gas station audits. I made my own questionnaire, they take between 5-7 minutes each. The reports online take about 8 minutes each. The longest part is organizing the pics by location/job id before my reports.

You can add as many locations as you want on google maps if you their map creator. Add them as points on the map then you can see where they all are with ease...