Seven questions you should ask yourself before getting start with planning your tour or road trip.

In this module we will take the 7 questions we just answered and start to flesh out our adventure. We will also do a simple calculation to determine if our idea is doable in the time period we have available.

One last step before we get started creating our GPS routes. First we need to go over the tools and terminology we are going to use to create our custom routes.

Here we finally bite into the meat of creating custom GPS routes. We start with a simple route and along the way learn a few best practices.

Now that we have the skills to create a simple GPX route, let's try creating a somewhat more complex one.

Now that we have created two routes, let's learn how to save them as GPX files and save them to your computer and GPS device.

Sometimes it is necessary to split a long route into shorter segments. Two reason to do this are for convince and to meet Garmin's 29 waypoint limitation for custom routes.

An option to using navigated routes, is to save you trip as a GPX Track. This this module we talk about how to used these file/route types.

In 2019, I took a 60 day nearly 12,000 mile trip across the United States and into Canada. To do this, I first created the "big picture" of my trip and then started splitting out each day so that I could customize each segment of my trip.

The MRA Routeplanner also allows you to display multiple routes on the same map. If needed, you can also join those routes together. 

Once I have all of my routes created, I build a spreadsheet that outlines each day of the trip. I track start location, end location, miles traveled, lodging, cost of lodging and make any necessary comments. This gives me a single document that I can give to my wife and take with me on the trip.

It is easy to create a simple budget for your trip. 

One of the arts to creating routes, is finding those great roads. In this bonus module, I cover the methods I used to while creating my adventures.