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639 Posts
Living Western Canada all of my life, my holidays have been mostly to Washington, Oregon & California. I have never been to Eastern Canada or the Eastern United States - unfortunately.
So when I read some of the forum members great stories of their daily or weekly excursions in the Eastern part of the USA, I have no idea of where those places are :?: , but I always like to learn something new every day, so I needed to find some good maps to follow along with.
I have noticed in the Eastern Canada, but in particular Eastern USA, that you have a lot of towns, cities and States in close proximity to one another. That is not really the case here where I live on Vancouver Island. The closest Canadian Province is Alberta and that is approx. 550 miles away :shock: . I chuckle when I see someone write that they travelled through four States in one day.
To help with my geographic education, this week I bought Microsoft's "Streets and Trips" software and installed it on my computer. So today when I read about Paul's great round trip through Iowa and Nebraska (Aftermarket & Accessories : Cold Weather riding R me, Sun Oct 24, 2004), I just typed in the places he mentioned into the "trip planner" and asked for directions. It drew out his route with a green line on a map that I could zoom in and out on.
That made his trip so much more interesting
because I could graphically see where he went (could even zoom down into the streets of the small towns), and I could also see any other points of interest that were on the route that he may have not mentioned. Afterwards, I saved the route on the hard drive so that I could call it up anytime I wanted in the future.
The program also gave me the distances, cost of fuel and approximate travel times, plus an exact step-by-step text instruction of each part of the route. This is a truly amazing program. This is far better than some old out-of-date paper map. It will even tell me if there is road construction on the route (updated via the Internet).
Now I am going to back and read all the other road stories, & enjoy them more than the first time I read them, because now I will be there with you, the rider. (well, virtually!)
A highly recommended program!
Reg
ps. buy it and then explore Beautiful British Columbia! :wink:
So when I read some of the forum members great stories of their daily or weekly excursions in the Eastern part of the USA, I have no idea of where those places are :?: , but I always like to learn something new every day, so I needed to find some good maps to follow along with.
I have noticed in the Eastern Canada, but in particular Eastern USA, that you have a lot of towns, cities and States in close proximity to one another. That is not really the case here where I live on Vancouver Island. The closest Canadian Province is Alberta and that is approx. 550 miles away :shock: . I chuckle when I see someone write that they travelled through four States in one day.
To help with my geographic education, this week I bought Microsoft's "Streets and Trips" software and installed it on my computer. So today when I read about Paul's great round trip through Iowa and Nebraska (Aftermarket & Accessories : Cold Weather riding R me, Sun Oct 24, 2004), I just typed in the places he mentioned into the "trip planner" and asked for directions. It drew out his route with a green line on a map that I could zoom in and out on.
That made his trip so much more interesting
The program also gave me the distances, cost of fuel and approximate travel times, plus an exact step-by-step text instruction of each part of the route. This is a truly amazing program. This is far better than some old out-of-date paper map. It will even tell me if there is road construction on the route (updated via the Internet).
Now I am going to back and read all the other road stories, & enjoy them more than the first time I read them, because now I will be there with you, the rider. (well, virtually!)
A highly recommended program!
Reg
ps. buy it and then explore Beautiful British Columbia! :wink: