Texas Trip, Day 6

Here’s another reason we like Comfort Inn: outlets. Lots of them. Fairly accessible. Each night we plug in two computers, one iPad, and two cell phones. It’s nice to not have to crawl behind furniture to be able to do that. Comfort Inn rooms have desks, too. With real office chairs. And the lamp on the desk at most of them has at least one outlet right in its base so it’s easy to plug in your computer and go right to work.

I’ve been playing with some more features of our GPS. Today we are experimenting with listing multiple potential stops. I want to know what happens when you don’t stop as well as what happens when you do.

I decided to start by entering rest areas. In the POI section under the trucking information I found a list of rest areas. This list basically starts with your current location and goes out from there in all directions. So you need to have an idea of what direction your road heads. For us today, that is north. So I just scrolled through the list and selected each stop that said it was north of me.

Next I went to the truck stop section to select fuel stops. We like Flying J and there were some of those on our route so I selected a couple.

Then I entered the motel we are shooting for today. I already had an address for it so I entered it directly. You start with the state. If you will be stopping in the current state you don’t have to do anything. If not, you enter the first few letters until it brings up a list. I only had to enter “Mi” and it gave me a list to choose from and I selected Missouri. The city then works the same way. Then you enter the “house” number and touch “done.” Then the street works like state and city.

Unfortunately, it puts all that on the list in the order you entered it. But each entry has an arrow you touch and drag to move it to the correct position. Touch “go” and you are ready to head on down the road. Unless you are sitting inside a building where there are no satellite views. Then the GPS will give you the choice of previewing the route. So you can do a dry run to get familiar with what will be coming up when you do move. Another nice feature.

For future reference, when I will be carrying my own facilities, I noted the GPS did not have parking only rest areas. I wonder if they are named something else on it? Have to look further into that.

But, I did get an anwer as to what happens if you don’t stop at an intermediate place on your route. A rest area we planned to stop at was closed so we couldn’t stop there. That meant the GPS thought we just missed our turn. It tried to get us to turn back at the next  four exits before I got tired of listening to that and started a new route instead. Maybe next time, we’ll pull off on the shoulder and stop to see if that is enough to make it happy again.

And when you do stop? It directed us right to the Flying J then promptly asked us to “Proceed to the highlighted route.” Which we did only after getting fuel first. So that part worked fine.

We just passed by a town whose name I didn’t catch. They are advertising their growth. But, I’m a little concerned about their city planning. What I saw was a cul-de-sac with a telephone pole in it. Not centered in it, either. Mentally draw lines bisecting the circle both north/south and east/west. Now follow that east/west line about halfway between the north/south line and the outer edge. Plant the telephone pole there. Now drive your semi-truck around the circle to go back the way you came. Challenging? You betcha! 🙂

We’re approaching Emporia, Kansas. There are two logical routes from there through Kansas City. One, first pick of both our GPS and Google Maps, is to stay on the Kansas Turnpike to Tulsa then turn east and take the outer loop around KC. The second is to exit the Turnpike to stay on I-35 and go right through downtown KC. According to Google Maps, the difference between the two routes is three miles. The shorter path takes three minutes longer. Since today is Sunday there is no reason to avoid downtown. But, there is always a reason to avoid paying extraneous tolls. So we’ll stay on I-35 and see how far we have to go before our GPS quits telling us to turn around.

It did well. By the time we paid the toll, and we had exact the exact amount out and ready,  it had already changed to match our chosen route. Way to go GPS!

If you ever find yourself in Kearney, Missouri, just north of Kansas City, anywhere near meal time be sure to go to the Stables Grill on the southwest corner of exit 26 off I-35. We ate there this evening and it was wonderful! I wasn’t particularly hungry going in but I ate all my Chicken Marsala and vegetable medley, about 1/2 the big pile of mashed potatoes and somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of Dave’s carrot cake. His club sandwich was huge and he ordered potato salad to go with it. All that for about $25. One of the staff told us the carrot cake is made from scratch by the head chef’s mother and I believe it. And I believe this small town cafe has a chef not a cook. And I love that the dining room is smoke free but the “tavern” isn’t. Since you go in the main door then turn one way or the other to go through doors into totally separate areas there is no spill-over air pollution. When you go, you’ll thank me.

TTYL,

Linda