Experience with the Tomtom on a longer trip

I just thought that I would tell about my expreicne with a trip I just
made to France and Germany pver the last few days.

First I must say that the map I used was not up to date. It was in fact
a few years old. What I used was the Tomtom One first edition with the
European card. I also use Linux, which means some software packages out
there won't work (like updating the map, for wich you nee Windows to
activate the map.)

What I did as prepration was the following:
I first made a route on maps.google.com, like http://tinyurl.com/dccr3r
I then went to my website (1) and turned that into an iterniary

If you soom into the startingpoint, it will look as if it is pretty
straight forward to leave the city. Start driving, cross a bridge, left,
right, cross a second bridge, left, ...

It would have been if the card was accurate. I crossed the second bridge
3 times. LOL. This because the waypoints where at places I could not get
to the first time.

So two lessons learned.
1 - See that your maps are up to date, and more importand
2 - If you travel by iterniaries, look if you really need them all.
Especially in city area's there are a LOT that are very close to each
other and city areas are also the places where the most changes are
being done.

That brings me to the next point, changes in your route. I think the
Tomtom I have is nice to find your way, but it is lousy for planning
routes. First I made the website, because it is so hard to enter it in
manually. Secondly if there is a change in between, it is very hard to
add a location in between.

I wanted to replace a waypoint in between some 45 waypoints. First I add
the waypoint, then I needed to move it, then change it from endpoint to
waypoint then look up the one I wanted to remove by counting the flag it
has and removing it.

And 45 waypoints shows you how close I came to the limit of 50 for the
Tomtom. I took basicaly the main roads, but if I would have taken
smaller roads, as I intend to do a next time, it would not have been
enough. These trips where all a but over 3 hour trips.

Sometimes you will have a detour. Either by roads being worked on or
festivities in a village I would like to pass. It askes me how long the
blocking is. I have no idea. Sometimes I know it will start in 5 KM, but
I must wait to enter it and then hope I have some more information.

It gets even worse when there is a waypoint on that part of the
roadblock. e.g. when there is some festivity in a village, most likely
the waypoint will be in that village as well.

The Tomtom then tells me that it can't find a route, so must go into
the iterniary tool and mark that waypoint as visited, then I need to
try again with the roadblock. Sometimes I need to remove a second one.

This often in places where there is no real good place to park, as you
can't do this while driving in a safe manner. I can handle the roadblock
part, but not the rest.

So I ended up just ignoring the Tomtom while folloing the detour or the
other cars and then marking the 'visited' part after the detour.

If there is no waypoint on the part, what I did was eneter a blocking of
5 KM, which led me though some extremely nice parts of France I would
otherwise not have seen. :-D

All in all, if I were to do such a trip again, I might look into Mio and
Garmin to see how their way of handeling a iterniary is. I would need to
buy a new map anyway, so I could just buy a new device.

(1) http://houghi.org/tomtom/
houghi
--
Let's not be too tough on our own ignorance. It's the thing that makes
America great. If America weren't incomparably ignorant, how could we
have tolerated the last eight years?         -- Frank Zappa, in 1988

We've had our 130S for about a year and a half. I use Windows so no problem
upgrading but the free initial upgrade was far from up to date. We haven't
been out of the USA with it yet. The only major problems we have are the
street name pronoucation and getting miss directed twice. Otherwise it's
been great.

wrote:


To make an itinerary that merely chooses a route, rather than to visit
places along the way, I do not believe so many waypoints are necessary.
When I do this I first enter the start and end points of the journey and
review which way TomTom chooses to take me. Then I only have to add a very
few extra points, enough just to nudge the route to the one I preferred.

Tony

houghi wrote:


Surely that can easily be fixed by just having 2 or 3 itinerys instead of just
one.




No reason why you cant use conventional navigation around the
detour and then return to the itinery when you are back on it again.



Not exactly the end of civilisation as we know it,
particularly since that shouldnt happen that often.