Favorites, POI's and waypoints
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I've been an enthusiastic MRA Gold member for several years, generally planning long distance tours. This year my wife and I are planning another 'bucket list' trip from Michigan to the Canadian Rockies. We'll find some new roads and re-visit some favorites from previous trips. I do all my route planning on a Windows desktop computer.
I think I know most of the MRA routeplanner features, but I still struggle with some steps in the planning process. This year's trip will span most of a month, and something like 7000 miles. In the past I started with one giant overview route, and split it into daily sections that are downloaded to my Garmin. This time I am working on a region at a time, maybe 2-3 days. The recently improved 'show routes' feature is fantastic for letting me see each of these regions on a larger map. They persist and update in my 'overview' map, and I find this tremendously helpful.
In the simplest terms, I would like to mark certain points as I am planning a region to consider a possible stop. If I use waypoints or favorites, they are automatically added to the route. Sometimes I am just considering the location for inclusion. The only way to maintain favorites is inside the application, but they are always visible on new routes. But if I place a half dozen points, the route becomes a mess.
So, I should use POI's, correct? I know how to create and upload a POI file in a CVS format to create a library. Incidentally, I found a simple Win application called 'Tablecruncher' that is a lightweight tool for doing just this. But once I have the Library loaded and turned on, I cannot see individual POI's unless I know about where they are on the route map, and zoom to the correct level. So two issues there that make route planning difficult.
The per-route implementation of POI in the 'manage' tab works a little better, as I can turn on and off any particular POI. The POI is visible regardless of zoom level. Two good features there. But I cannot maintain the list off-line, and I cannot carry it into a new route.
I did start a thread some time ago regarding new features for the early stages of planning, it seems to me that something is needed that does not fit into the current implementation of 'Favorites' or 'POI's'. I would like to include more text fields and hyperlinks. I've been collecting articles and saving FB posts for months, I use Trello to manage a list of routes and places that might be included on a trip. If I could use Routeplanner itself for saving that research, life would be simpler.
Sorry for the very long post. If there are features of the MRA Routeplanner that I am overlooking, I would love to know. The closest thing to a solution that I found searching the forum was a suggestion to keep a 'template' route with many POI's saved in the 'manage' tab. I considered that briefly, but it does not seem to be a very elegant solution.
