It has made such a huge difference in how we planned and managed trips with the kids. I would always plan a general route around a specific set of activities that we booked in advance. I knew when I needed to arrive at a specific location and in general, how long it would occupy us. A typical trip would revolve around a main activity like rafting a river for a few days, I would work in opportunities to visit a few national parks where the kids could build their Junior Ranger badge collections, and leave opportunities for adding local activities that may not be obvious up front.
We mapped hotels and campgrounds, nearby attractions, etc. and then I filled in gaps so that we didn't spend the entire day traveling with no fun stuff on the agenda. I was always able to use the functionality to get an accurate idea about distances per day, time spent traveling per day, fuel costs per day, etc. We picked restaurants using online searches so that we could locate great food options and figure out whether we would pass close enough to drop in and eat well without breaking our schedule.
Once we made it to a stop, and time could be allocated to every stop in advance, planned to the minute(!), we would review our future plans and evaluate whether we could or should change anything including the route, accommodations, etc. I would investigate any ideas that you normally find on hotel or campground brochures, any highway local interest signs, etc and see whether we could detour if they weren't already on the map.
I would lay out all the new options and, with the wife and kids, we would take a vote on how to proceed. I could modify all the plans right there on the laptop dump the maps to a USB drive, and print the new maps on the hotel printer or at Kinkos so that we would have up-to-date plans at hand every morning.
We took many multi-state trips circling across the US. They were precision planned and simple for anyone to follow so that my wife and I could switch from driver to navigator as needed.
After it was all cancelled and new maps and highway info was not available we would use online maps to find new addresses and then locate that spot in S&T and place a marker in S&T and navigate to that marker. That's how we play it now.
I am so glad that you responded since I wanted someone to know that they did excellent work and that at least one of us appreciates all the thought and effort that went into it. And we still use it in planning road trips.
Kudos to you and your colleagues.
I use ESRI-ArcGIS, QGIS, and have used GRASS. You all produced such a user-friendly, feature-packed, useful product with a gentle learning curve so that a casual user could get what they need from standard, easy to understand menu selections and you made it affordable.
It truly is and was a great product and I have been using computers since the DOS wars on X86 hardware and the days of the original Mac. Some software I have used I always hoped never to need to use again after the first time. I know with S&T that the task is easy because talented people put some thought into a list of useful features and then executed the coding to the point where annoyances were absent and roadblocks existed only where the latest highway update said they existed.
Thanks! My wife and I have really enjoyed using that software. It is a masterpiece.