Get Lost (and Found) With AAA Map'n'Go 6.0

Sure, you can find driving directions online. But what about all the points of interest along the way? The greasy spoons? What about the tourist traps and fleabag hotels you'd want to avoid? Offering a unified solution is DeLorme's $25 AAA Map'n'Go 6.0. This package makes easy work of finding thousands of hotels and restaurants--along with the requisite point-to-point driving directions, destination information, and basic street-level mapping for urban centers.

Map'n'Go plans a route for you between two cities, and then helps you find points of interest along the way. The data is culled from AAA recommendations of more than 66,000 places to eat, stay, and sightsee in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The software also offers 1 million miles of road map coverage, and detailed maps for more than 240 urban locations.

In our tests the software performed admirably, finding quick routes to destinations and recommending worthy points of interest. But in rural areas, the software had some holes; we were unable to find the addresses we were hoping to locate.

On the Road With Map'n'Go

Compatible with most flavors of Microsoft Windows (95, 98, NT 4.0, and 2000), Map'n'Go packs a wealth of information in a single CD-ROM. As with previous versions, Map'n'Go 6.0 starts out by launching a wacky, cartoony interface that resembles a car's dashboard. The novice-oriented design includes an illustration that highlights the program's most often used features, such as planning a trip or finding a location. Once you make a selection, the welcome screen is quickly replaced by the software's standard interface, which looks like that of an ordinary Windows application, complete with toolbars, menus, and an area in which to display maps.

Once in the program, we had to poke around a bit before we found the two text-box screens that allowed us to start our trip planning. You can enter your origin and destination, but the interface is such that it's not immediately obvious how you can enter a specific address. We hunted around the menus until we uncovered the Find Address selection, but our location just outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina, wasn't listed in Map'n'Go's database. (We should note that most mapping software seems to have the same problem with our admittedly rural location.) Instead, we had to find our own path to the state highway.

While we found that the mapping information is detailed for roads, highways, and 240 metro areas, the package is not designed for street-level mapping. For that you'll need a separate software package, such as DeLorme's Street Atlas USA 7.0.

Mapping Assistant

We used Map'n'Go to plan a trip to Asheville, in the mountains of North Carolina. Since we were familiar with the three-hour test trip we selected to map out, we were able to gauge Map'n'Go's recommendations on roads and local establishments.

After we entered the starting and ending locations, the software highlighted the route on a map. Once you generate your map, you can print the results or download them to a Palm or Windows CE handheld device. The map we printed was fashioned after AAA's TripTik, with page-by-page maps and directions.

While the software surprisingly doesn't use wizards to walk you through the steps, we liked how the online help explained each step of the process in detail, complete with illustrations and buttons that will launch the necessary commands. The printed manual, on the other hand, is disappointing and weak on detail; for instance, it offers just half a page of instructions on planning a trip.