Description:
While perfect planning won't prevent unexpected mishaps or misadventures, National Geographic Trip Planner 2002 helps you map out the things you can control to make your business trip or vacation run smoothly. From customized maps to Frommer's hotel and restaurant reviews (it even offers portable planning on your PDA), this application will get you out the door and coasting down the freeway in no time. Trip Planner 2002 comes complete with three installation CDs: a program disc, multimedia disc, and street locator disc. To get started, you'll need to first install the multimedia disc. Once that's done, pop in the program disc and do an install. Afterwards, you'll need to reinsert the multimedia disc--which seems a bit backward to us and led to some initial confusion, although everything is clearly laid out in the user's guide. You can use the street locator disc any time after initial program installation, although you may need to reinsert the multimedia disc--another seemingly superfluous step. The application allows users to plan a road trip in one of two ways: using the trip wizard or manually. The trip wizard is the fastest and easiest method, as you are asked to choose your origin and your destination from a long list of possible cities, and fill in stops along the way. However, you're not given a list of possible stops in between your origin and destination--you need to figure that out on your own, either using the included map or an exterior resource. You can also choose from a list of visits at your origin, destination, or a city in between. We planned a trip from Seattle to Vancouver, B.C., and were given a huge list of restaurants, historic attractions, scenic parks, and more in each city. Other notable features in Trip Planner 2002 include the ability to budget your trips by estimating your fuel, food, and lodging expenses. However, these numbers are provided in a very general format, so if you are on a serious budget, you'll probably want to do some number crunching on your own. Another benefit to this program are the travel tips and recommendations from National Geographic writers, which add value in the manner of a travel guidebook. Finally, PDA users will appreciate that they can download information directly onto their Palms, rather than keeping track of printed itineraries and maps. A few important notes--if you're looking to go anywhere besides the U.S. and Canada, Trip Planner 2002 is not for you. Also, if you simply want driving directions and maps, you can find this information for free on many travel Web sites. However, if you want more in-depth details and recommendations for points of interest along the way, Trip Planner 2002 offers enough extras to make it a worthwhile purchase. --Gisele Toueg
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