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Happy Birthday to us!

Thursday, March 29th, 2012

Two years ago today, myscenicdrives.com was launched. We began with many drives in Washington State where we’re based, a few in Oregon, and a grand vision. A lot of miles, maps, research, and picnics later we’re proud to feature drives in 25 states and are continuing to make myscenicdrives.com the go to website for all your road trip planning needs.

We’ve had an exciting year with many new developments. Here are four highlights:

  • Hooray for our 25th state, Rhode Island. This small ocean state has a rich cultural heritage, stunning natural beauty and diverse wildlife. Oh and did we mention the seafood?
  • We released a comprehensive Road Trip Planner, which allows you to plan your road trip adventures throughout the world, seamlessly dividing your trip into manageable driving days, providing you with GPS and printed directions (including Turn-by-Turn directions), and a mobile-friendly interface to perfect your trip wherever you are.
  • We’re proud of coverage in the LA Times, the Kim Komando Show, and other media.
  • We’re grateful to our many Facebook fans and website and road trip planner users, who have given us positive feedback, suggestions suggestions, and notified us of problems which ultimately made the site better.

We have more interesting features planned for the next several months and are always adding scenic drives.

Thanks for using myscenicdrives.com!

Posted in Development, Road Trip Planner, Scenic Drives, Travel | Comments Off

A New Year for a Road Trip

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

Hopefully getting out more often was one of your New Year’s resolutions? Discover a nearby destination, take a weekend getaway to that special somewhere you’ve always wanted to see, and like many of our users, begin planning your summer road trip!

It’s never been easier using our Road Trip Planner! We hope you enjoy all our new features.

Path Compression

You ask, we listen. This feature was requested by many users to use with Export to GPS, simplifying the routes exported to your GPS. Choose from three options:

  • Normal: Export turn-by-turn GPS directions.
  • Start and Finish: just the start and finish of your stops and your days.
  • Half Point and Merge: merges all directions less than the selected distances, and then exports the half points of your long routes to direct you more efficiently onto highways and intersections.

Adding Destinations

Entering an address has never been easier now with our new Add Destination interface.

You’re going to love our simplified interface. Just click Add Destination below your last stop to add addresses, search for destinations, nearby stops and more.

Do you use address book management software? More than likely it supports a vCard format which you can now upload to our Road Trip Planner saving some copy-’n-pasting. To import, select File and select Import Address from VCard.

Enhanced Hotels Features

Finding a hotel on myscenicdrives.com is more responsive and faster.

Now you can add hotels booked on myscenicdrives.com by phone to your Road Trip Plan. Just select your reservation from Add Travel Accommodations.

And for your convenience, we’ve added more payment options.

Undo and Redo

The myscenicdrives.com Road Trip Planner has integrated Undo and Redo making it easy to explore.

Have you ever wanted to try out options in our Road Trip Planner didn’t want to lose what you already created? Worry no more! We’ve added Undo and Redo for most operations throughout our Road Trip Planner, making it a cinch to restore your trip back to the way it was.

Activities Updates

Jot down ideas of what you are planning to do within an area with our Activities Feature, now available on iPad!

Just one click on Add Activity is a quick and easy way to add destinations, places of interests and personal notes to a stop. And best of all, it now works on iPad!

Cost per Liter Support

Using the metric system? We’ve added support for liters in our gas calculator and Road Trip Planner.

Support for Importing and Exporting CSV

Our Road Trip Planner now supports importing and exporting of Comma-Separated Files, commonly known as CSV. Customize your column layout using our CSV Import and Export tools.

Using CSV for one of our scenic drives? Just add the Scenic Drive to a Road Trip and then use our GPS Exporter to generate the CSV file you need.

We love feedback!

If there’s anything we can improve or change to make it easier to plan your trip, please e-mail us. Happy and safe travels!

Posted in Road Trip Planner, Scenic Drives | Comments Off

Now in New Hampshire!

Thursday, November 10th, 2011
The White Mountains

Growing up in New Hampshire, I’ve had the chance to explore many of New England’s roads and locally-known “secrets”. I’ve been looking forward to adding New England to myscenicdrives.com since we launched a year-and-half ago, so it gives me great pleasure to announce the first set of scenic drives in New Hampshire.

Beginning with a few of the classics, these are the “must-see” roads of New Hampshire — and of course there’s more to come. Let us know your favorites.

We’re also happy to announce that we are now resellers of the White Mountain National Forest Passes, required at many day-use areas in the White Mountain National Forest. These fees help support and maintain high-quality recreation facilities. Save time by purchasing yours on myscenicdrives.com.

Posted in Forest Passes, Scenic Drives | Comments Off

Find new Scenic Drives with our Side Trips and Map Surfer

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

We’re always developing new ways to help you find scenic drives and plan road trips. Our latest features make it easy to find side trips and get inspiration by interacting with our maps.

Finding scenic drives on myscenicdrives.com has been made easier with Side Trips, Panning, Zooming, and Map Surfing.

Side Trips

Side Trips, such as this one to Crater Lake, can now be shown on the state maps.

Some of the best experiences are short side trips off our main scenic drives. And sometimes (thanks to your suggestions!), we hear about a great road but have not had the time to put together the full description and interactive map that you have come to love from us.

Until now, these gems have been in a feature we call Side Trips, which you may have noticed in our Recommended Stops or when using our Road Trip Planner.

Today, we unleash side trips to a more prominent position on our main, State maps page. Click “Show Side Trips” in the green bar above the map and voila — yellow square icons appear on the map. When you hover your mouse over the icons, it will provide details about the scenic route.

You can easily add these side trips to your road trip plan or get directions by clicking on the link that appears when you hover. Keep in mind that Side Trips do not have turn-by-turn directions, so you may want to print out a copy of the Side Trip.

Zooming and Panning on the State Overview Maps

Our maps are automatically adjusted to ensure that the entire drive or state is displayed, and sometimes, that’s small. We have always included the ability to click “Expand Map” so users can zoom and pan in our Drives and Places of Interest, but our state overview maps didn’t have that… until today.

Now after choosing a State, you can zoom and pan to highlight particular areas on the overview map. Used with our new Side Trips feature, finding the perfect scenic drive is easier than ever.

Map Surfer

The myscenicdrives.com Map Surfer allows you to cross state boundaries to help plot your road trips, such as this one that spans from San Francisco to Seattle.

Need inspiration for your cross-country road trip? Not sure what’s on the way? Use our Map Surfer!

Don’t miss out on great roads close to where you’re already traveling. Choose a state, click “Map Surfer” from the green bar across the top of the map and once enabled, more of our scenic drives will appear when you pan and zoom on the map. Add the scenic drives that catch your eye to our Road Trip Planner, book your hotels, and you’re ready to hit the road.

Winding up

We have a lot more drives in new states coming very soon making these new features even cooler. Keep sending your recommended roads and feedback — we love hearing from you. Thank you for using myscenicdrives.com.

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A month of new features…

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

It has been a busy month since we launched our Road Trip Planner and we keep on tinkering all of our tools to make it even better and easier to use. Here are some of the highlights for this month.

Facebook Apps

Visit our Facebook Page for new apps which allow you to explore some of our tools and features while on Facebook. Don’t forget to click “Like” to keep up-to-date with our latest news.

New Mobile Look

myscenicdrives.com QR Code

If you haven’t visited us on your phone yet, give it a try! We’ve just redesigned our mobile site to make it easier to navigate and find scenic drives and hotels while on the go! Visit http://www.myscenicdrives.com in your mobile browser and leave the driving to us, so to speak.

Road Trip Planner

Improved Hotels Interface

Find hotels quickly and easily along your road trip with myscenicdrives.com's improved Hotel Interface.

As always, same great rates and no booking fees, but we have a new and improved hotel finder in the road trip planner with great features such as remembering the settings from your last hotel search, the ability to quickly see how far hotels are from your selected route, and finding vacancies in nearby towns.

Set your Trip Dates

You can now set your trip dates from a calendar and your itinerary will have calendar days associated with it, making planning that much easier. Configure dates under the Trip Properties.

Take it Day by Day

We’ve added a few features to our daily itineraries which allow more flexibility in planning each day.

First, you can display an icon on the map showing where you will be spending each night. At a glance, you can see how close or far you are from a destination, offering the opportunity to make changes if necessary.

We also added the ability to expand and collapse the days and directions in your itinerary, allowing you to quickly jump from one day to another, or see your rough plan per day.

You can also set driving times per day or influence driving time by specifying a flexibility time under the General Properties. Using this feature, if your next destination is just a short distance away from your desired driving time per day, our Road Trip Planner will include the extra driving time for that day.

Improved Trip Sharing Wizard

myscenicdrives.com allows you to quickly share your trips by e-mail and on Facebook, Twitter, and other Social Networks.

Want to share your trip on Facebook, Twitter, or another Social Network? Our improved Trip Sharing Wizard has been updated to allow you to post your trips safely and quickly. Full details are in documentation.

And more!

Here are other enhancements:

  • Many enhancements to zooming, including double-click on the map to zoom, finer-grained zooming, zooming to the continental US, and more.
  • Remove all destinations from a trip for advanced trip planning.
  • Support for Kilometers and Road Preferences.
  • Improved IPad support.
  • Added Distance Circles to quickly gauge distances of on the map.
  • Added support for searching for destinations by latitude and longitude (expressed in decimal or degrees, minutes and seconds).

And more to come

Everyone plans a little differently and we like to provide you with flexible tools that work with your style. We have a lot of new features coming up shortly, but we love building the features you ask for. If there is something that would help plan your trip better, please let us know! We look forward to hearing from you.

Posted in Development, Hotels, Road Trip Planner, Scenic Drives | Comments Off

Texas is now on myscenicdrives.com

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Presenting our Texas Scenic Drives. A volcanic legacy creates legendary vistas of canyons, lakes, hoodoos, limestone cliffs, desert, riparian forest, and grasslands. A historic legacy of Native Americans, Mexican, Spanish and European settlers color the history, architecture and culture. From remote backcountry to quaint towns, the Rio Grande to wine country, explore the unique beauty of Texas.

Have other scenic drives that we shouldn’t miss? Send them to us and we’ll add them to the site soon!

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myscenicdrives.com now in Colorado!

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

A Colorado Scenic Drive through the Mountains Lucky Colorado, the 13th state in our growing roster. And 13 reasons to visit:

  1. more than 1,000 peaks over 10,000-feet high
  2. 54 peaks over 14,000-feet high
  3. gold rush and mining history
  4. the Wild West
  5. the cliff-dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans
  6. cliff-hugging roads
  7. glacier-carved valleys
  8. wildflowers blooming in alpine tundra
  9. chile peppers
  10. Four Corners
  11. dinosaur fossils
  12. the world’s largest mesa
  13. virtually limitless recreation opportunities

And as a special bonus, the 13th step of the state capitol building in Denver is exactly 1 mile above sea level.

Here is our first group of Colorado Scenic Drives:

Have a favorite that we should explore next? Let us know in the comments or send an e-mail.

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New update brings Garmin GPS, Printable Directions, Elevation, and more!

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

In addition to bringing you the best scenic routes, we also bring you the tools to make hitting the road a cinch. Our latest round of features fall right into this category and we hope you enjoy them. Each feature is available by selecting the tab in the yellow bar before the Description of each drive.

Have GPS, Will Travel

One of the nice things about myscenicdrives.com is that we provide you with free, GPS files for your phone and GPS devices. Simply download a file for your favorite device and go!

Download GPS directions to your Garmin GPS on myscenicdrives.comIf you own a Garmin GPS, we’ve just made this process even easier by integrating with the free Garmin Communicator Plugin. When you have this plugin installed, simply connect your GPS to your computer, select Garmin Communicator Plugin

from the GPS selection on any of our drives, and download the route directly to your device.

Depending on the Garmin GPS that you own, you will either receive the entire pre-planned route or you can reconstruct the route with the waypoints using the Trip Planner on the GPS itself.

Printable Directions

No matter how high-tech the world becomes, sometimes it is just easier to print out the directions on a piece of good old-fashioned paper and we are happy to provide this feature for you.

Under the Print Directions menu, enter in your current address (or use your browser’s GPS technology if available) and where you want to end up after the scenic drive and we’ll provide you with a full overview map, drive overview, and turn-by-turn directions, from which you can decide what you’d like to have printed from the print options at the top of the page.

To New Heights: Scenic Drive Elevation Information

Elevation Graph for Mount Rainier Scenic Drive on myscenicdrives.comNow included with each of our scenic drives is a graph that shows the elevation of each mile during the drive as described. Find out how high the scenic drive climbs, how high you will reach and how close to sea level you will get.

Try them now

So what are you waiting for? Find the perfect scenic drive now! There are several more features and services that we are planning, but of course, we want to hear from you about what tools you’d like to see and how we can improve our tools to make it easier for you to hit the road. Please let us know in the comments or e-mail us.

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One Year Birthday! Discover New Mexico!

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

A different road trip awaits on myscenicdrives.comHappy Birthday! One year ago today, we launched myscenicdrives.com. Beginning with just over 25 drives in Oregon and Washington, we now feature more than 100 scenic drives spanning 10 states. A huge thank you for all your encouragement, suggestions and the passion to get out and explore our beautiful planet. Today, we’re celebrating by launching our 11th, New Mexico.

Discover a landscape steeped in Native American and Spanish history, art and culture. Explore cliff dwellings and pueblos, museums and churches. Look back upon the Wild West and its many colorful characters including the infamous Billy the Kid. Immerse yourself in the sheer beauty of New Mexico’s rugged diverse scenery. Snow-capped mountains, dessert, hot springs, lava fields and gypsum white sand dunes are the stunning wonders of millions of years of geologic upheaval. Add in an endless variety of recreational opportunities for every season, and you have an adventure packed with a lifetime of memories.

Our first set of New Mexico Scenic Drives are:

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Pacific Northwest Scenic Driving and Hiking

Friday, March 4th, 2011

Pacific Northwest National Forests

From rugged ocean coast to lush, moss-draped forests to the snow-capped volcanic peaks of the Cascade Mountains the Pacific Northwest is a diverse scenic playground. Our Pacific Northwest Scenic Drives offer exhilarating adventures that hopefully tempt you out of the car and into nature. Whether you are a seasoned hiker up for a day-long trek or interested in a quiet leisurely stroll and picnic, certain areas of Pacific Northwest National Forests require day-use permits.

We are happy to announce that we are now an official reseller of the Pacific Northwest National Forest Passes. Save time by purchasing your passes online before you go. Our secure checkout is easy and orders are usually shipped same day!

As the weather improves (we hope :) ), explore the natural beauty that our National Forests and Parks preserve and protect. And remember, it’s the journey, not the destination.

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