Tech Geek

As you start to plan your summer adventures you may be planning a road trip with your group. I find that these trips are much less stressful when I, and the other drivers, are armed with directions and maps so that we all know the route we're going to follow ahead of time. I also find that a GPS is extremely valuable while trying to navigate in a city that's new to me.

Before starting any trip with you group, I'd recommend reviewing the pamphlet entitled The Road to Safer Transportation from Church Mutual Insurance Company. It has some suggestions on driver and passenger behavior and special concerns when operating a large van. Once you've got your policies and procedures figured out, investigate your route.

For my test case I am going to plot a route from my church in Kalispell, MT to Field's Point Landing where you get on the Ferry Boat for Holden Village. To add a bit of complexity, I'm going to route via Grace Lutheran Church in Wenatchee, since they are listed as a church that is willing to host people on the ELCA Youth Ministry Network Website. (Click here to see that resource!) We'll stay there overnight before heading to Field's Point to pick up the ferry in the morning. I'll run my basic query through three different mapping services, Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, and Google Maps.

Mapquest is probably the oldest of the mapping services. According to Wikipedia, they were founded in 1967 as Cartographic Services! They didn't start serving maps up on the internet until 1996, which is pretty old in computer time! Here are the steps I used from Mapquest:

1. From the homepage at www.mapquest.com I scrolled down to Directions
2. I entered my starting location (323 Northridge Dr. in Kalispell, MT) and my ending location. Since I don't know the address of Field's Point Landing, I put Field's Point Landing in the Find a Business box and put Chelan, WA in the City and State boxes. I clicked the Get Directions button.
3. I received a map showing potential options for Field's Point Landing. I scrolled down to find the one I wanted and pressed the Select button.
4. This brought up a screen with turn-by-turn directions and a map at the bottom showing the suggested route. I could also select to Avoid certain road types, print the route, link to the page, or send the route to a cell phone or a Garmin GPS.
5. I still needed to add the church stopover, so I scrolled down to the Add Another Stop to your Route box and entered Grace Lutheran Church, Wenatchee, WA and clicked on the Go button.
6. I pressed Select next to the correct Grace Lutheran Church. (They also provided a link to the church website, so I could verify it was the one I was looking for.)
7. This brought up the route, but not quite in the right order, as it had me going to Field's Point and then the church. I clicked the Move Down button next to Field's Point.
8. Finally, I added my starting point in again as Point D. We'll take a slightly different route home than we'll take to get there.
9. Mapquest makes it very easy to avoid segments of the route by clicking the Avoid link to the right of each segment.
10. If you click the Map link next to each segment you will see the map for that segment. Clicking Print will print only those maps that you have selected. I didn't see an easy way to print the maps for each turn.
    

Yahoo Maps has also been around for quite awhile. Their interface takes you straight to a map of your last location.

1. I went to the start page at maps.yahoo.com and I entered the church address as the starting address and then entered Field's Point Landing, Chelan, WA in the Find a Business box.
2. Yahoo couldn't find anything! This was because the map was zoomed into Kalispell.
3. I put Chelan, WA into the destination box and it immediately calculated directions for me. Then I put Field's Point Landing into the Find a Business box and this time I got a list of possibilities.
4. I clicked the Directions To link under Field's Point Landing.
5. Then I clicked the X to remove Chelan, WA as a destination. Interestingly enough, the route changed.
6. I was able to add Grace Lutheran, although not as easily as on Mapquest. Then, I couldn't find an easy way to re-order my stops.
7. If I had a Mercedes Benz, apparently I could send the directions straight to my car!
   

If you've been reading these posts, you'll not be surprised to know that I have had good success with Google Maps. I prefer their non-cluttered interface that doesn't have big flashy ads all over the place. Here's the same process in Google Maps:

1. I went to maps.google.com and put Field's Point Landing, Chelan, WA into the search box.
2. I clicked Get Directions in the pop-up and entered the church address into the Starting Address box. (Actually, since I've used it before, it auto-filled the address once I typed the 323 part.)
3. It presented me a route which was the same as the Mapquest one and probably more user-friendly than that Yahoo one.
4. I clicked Add Destination and entered Grace Lutheran Church, Wenatchee, WA. It gave me a choice of the two Grace Lutheran Churches in the area and I selected the one I wanted.
   
5. In the left hand column I clicked the minus sign to collapse the directions and dragged Grace Lutheran above Field's Point Landing.
6. I clicked Add Destination and put the church back in to go home.
7. Clicking Print brings up turn-by-turn directions with maps of the individual destinations. Clicking Send lets you e-mail the directions.
8. You can also adjust your route by dragging the blue line on the map.
   

Overall, I think Google Maps are the easiest to use and that Mapquest is the most powerful. Any of these services beat trying to unfold a paper map while driving a van!

Wikipedia hosts a comparison of Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Live Search Maps from Microsoft.