May Newsletter
Road tripping season is here
Road tripping season is here and we’ve been busy adding awesome new features to make your trip planning even easier. Here are the highlights.
Electric Vehicle Support
Nervous about where to charge on long trips? Our Electric Vehicle Support locates EV charging stations along your route and with a simple click, you can add them to your road trip plan, get turn-by-turn directions and incorporate the charge time into your daily itinerary. Now just relax and enjoy the ride.
Got Campgrounds? We do!
One of the features most requested by users is to have campground locations on our Road Trip Planner. Today, we’re happy to be releasing a public-beta test. We still have a lot more campgrounds to add, but we wanted to get this feature out as soon as possible. Please let us know how it’s working for you.Planes, Trains, and more!
Imagine your road trip has you leaving from home and heading first to an airport, or perhaps a segment of your road trip includes a train ride. You can now add these to your Road Trip Plan as a Non-Driving Destination. Select Add a Destination and then Non-Drive to enter airport codes, train stations or addresses of start and end locations as well as travel time, and we’ll seamlessly provide directions!
Manage your Budget
We’ve always calculated your fuel costs, but now you can manage your entire trip budget by entering a daily spending amount and/or costs for meals, entertainment or lodging associated with each stop.
Managing Days
Dividing your trip into manageable days is a user favorite. We’ve added a new section to our documentation to help you get up-and-running faster using this practical tool. Full details here.
One of our new features is Non-Stop Drives. Available on the Schedule Tab of all destination properties, you can now specify that the driving period from one stop to another should not be divided, no matter how long the drive is. This can be useful for days where you aiming to get as close as you can to your destination before stopping. Of course we recommend driving no longer than 8 hours a day. See our driving tips.
A related feature is the ability to turn off dividing the days completely. This is useful when you want to concentrate on the roads you are traveling on rather than the daily driving details. Go to the Trip Properties Day tab to enable and disable this feature.
Hotel Updates
We offer great hotel rates around the globe. Enjoy the convenience of our Hotel Prices in Euros and British Pounds, as well as United States Dollar and Canadian Dollar.
In addition, simplify your planning with our new Potential Hotels feature. After searching through our hotel database in the Road Trip Planner, add some of the possibilities to your trip. When you’re ready, just finalize and book — all in one place. Along with highly competitive rates, you get your confirmation, accommodation details and turn-by-turn directions incorporated into your itinerary.
Printing Enhancements
We are continually refining our Printing and Exporting abilities. One of our major features is the ability to print the Day Markers, allowing a clear visual of where you will be spending each night. We’ve also added a font-size adjustment tool on the printing screen.
Importing Road Trip Itineraries
When planning long trips or collaborating with others on trip planning, you might be working on portions of a trip separately — but how do you bring all those pieces together? Select the Import Road Trip feature and automatically import all of the unique stops from one trip into the current trip.
Coupled with our Save As functionality, this is a quick and easy way to plan and collaborate with family and friends.
Importing GPS Files
We have made it even easier to import your routes from popular GPS software by auto-detecting the file extension.
In addition to improving our Comma-Separated Values (CSV) importer, we have also added support for Tab-Separated Values (TSV). These file formats are useful to quickly integrate with other tools.
Export to GPS Updates
If you’re using the Garmin Communicator Plugin to export our trips onto your GPS, you will note that we have recently upgraded our software to use the latest and greatest Garmin Communicator Plugin. Don’t worry, the upgrade is free and simple to do.
In our last post, we introduced a feature called Path Compression which removes some of the detail in our exported file-formats, making it easier for certain GPS units to follow our directions. Since then, we’ve added a new Path Compression called “Just Stops” which only export your exact stops.
And as noted above, we’ve added support for exporting Tab-Separated Files to new tools.
Enhancing Tablet Support
We have supported IPad for a while and have recently added support for Android Tablets. Simply direct your favorite web browser to myscenicdrives.com and enjoy. For Android Tablets, best results are achieved in full-screen mode, such as in the Dolphin Browser.
Love to Share?
If you love to share your road trips with family and friends, easily keep them up-to-date with any changes you make by using your browsers auto-complete. Most modern web browsers will display this information if you double click within the Share’s e-mail box.
General News
Free myscenicdrives caps
Thank you to all our users for your support and feedback. To show our appreciation, we’re giving away a myscenicdrives cap in a random drawing every time we reach another 100 Facebook likes until the end of August. If you’re not a Facebook user, send us an e-mail at info@myscenicdrives.com to be automatically entered. The first one went out to Julie M. in Monrovia CA at 4000. Who’s next?
What — no app?
Our entire site has always offered all the features you love in our desktop version, slimmed down to a full-screen, touch-friendly interface in your mobile web browser. Plan, edit, share, and get directions on the go — as usual, with no software installation or updates.
Forest passes
It’s road trippin’ and hiking season. If you need a forest pass, we’ve got you covered. Pacific Northwest National Forest, Southern California Forest Adventure Pass, Arizona's Tonto National Forest and Coconino National Forest’s Red Rock Country, New Hampshire White Mountain National Forest and if your travels take you far and often, the cost-effective America the Beautiful.
Have happy and safe summer travels!
Newest Drives
We are always adding new scenic drives. If you want to be notified as soon as they’re released, subscribe to our newest drives list or follow us on Facebook, Bluesky, or by RSS.