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!

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

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

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

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!

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.

• New Hampshire 153
• Kancamagus Scenic Byway
• Three Rivers Scenic Drive
• White Mountain Trail

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.

Planning your Activities

Imagine you are planning a road trip to San Francisco and intend to spend a few days exploring. Perhaps friends have mentioned museums or restaurants you shouldn’t miss. With our previous version, you would have to add them as a specific stop on your road trip plan or make notes.

Now with Activities, you can simply add these items to your San Francisco stop. Click on Activities to expand the menu and drag any existing stops or search results into Activity. Activities are just like regular stops, except that we do not provide directions to them and they are not scheduled, but they will be exported to your GPS as places of interest (for all devices that support them) and will be on your printout.

Activities are presently not available on iPad and Mobile devices.

Improved Printed Directions

We’ve updated the printed directions to make them even easier to use.

Instead of just offering a list of stops, we now provide a rich overview that summarizes your travels for each day. At a glance, you know how far you’re traveling and which stops you will see along the way, allowing you to ensure that you have enough time to visit each one.

The printed map is now on a separate page and larger than before. This is especially useful for longer trips.

We are now including the stop number in the driving directions, allowing you to quickly reference the directions with the maps. This number system is also included in the user interface as well. And you now have the option to print out each day’s travel on a separate page. While this can be really useful for long trips, we also encourage you to consider the environment before enabling it .

To Do Lists

The new To Do List guides you through the Road Trip Planner by making it simple to get directions, highlighting days with very few hours of driving, reminders for finding overnight accommodations, and more helpful suggestions to come.

Have something you’d like us to check or remind you? Let us know!

To Do Lists are presently not available on our mobile editions.

Improved Route Optimizations

If you are planning a cross-country road trip, more than likely you have many stops planned. We’ve now improved the way we calculate the optimal routes and even the most complex routes are optimized in several minutes. Don’t need such a fine-tuned plan right away? Our Rough Optimizer is not 100% precise, but provides a rough idea in seconds.

And more

Some of our smaller features this month:

• We’ve added the ability to create trips without our From/To wizard by selecting New Blank Trip. This feature is partially a power-user feature, but it is also handy for when you want to search for destinations using our Finder.
• We have also added a Vehicle Type option to the Trip Properties which will help us develop specific features and routes in the future.

Our favorite features are the ones you suggest, so keep them coming. Thanks for using myscenicdrives.com and happy planning!

Side Trips

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

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.

Mobile Road Trip Planner

Our new mobile Road Trip Planner offers all the features you love in our desktop version, slimmed down to a full-screen, touch-friendly interface in your mobile web browser on IPhones and Androids. Now you can plan, edit, share, and upload GPS directions on the go with no software installation or updates.

We have optimized some features for the mobile experience. Highlights are:

• You can now use our GPS directions on your phone’s Google Maps Mobile application. In the Export Maps Menu, we’ve added a new “Provide Direct Links” checkbox, which when selected, will allow you to copy the GPS file links to your mobile phone. You can read more about that below.
• We’ve also added the “Follow Me” feature. Using your phone’s GPS, your location will be highlighted on the map. This allows you to quickly know where you are without adding your location as stop.

Route Optimizer

With so many great stops, planning the ideal route can be complicated. Using our new Route Optimizer, we can determine the best route that connects all of your stops and update your Road Trip Plan to avoid backtracking, save time and gas.

This feature can be accessed from the Map menu, and of course you can override or change as fits your trip best.

GPS File Format Updates

GPS devices are a valuable asset to hitting the road and we’ve now made it easier to load our routes onto your devices.

We have added the ability to download the GPS files directly into applications such as the Google Maps Mobile application. Prior to this update, you could only access the GPS files if you login, but now, if you enable the “Offsite GPS Support”, you can access the directions easily. Choose Export to GPS and select the “Direct Link” option.

Many of the new TomTom devices do not have support for Itineraries. For these devices, we have added TomTom Place of Interest (OV2) support. Simply select it as an export format, load it onto your TomTom via MyTomTom, and configure your route from those places of interest. Best of all, this feature is available for all of our scenic drives! TomTom will soon be releasing a new application that will make this even easier. Keep an eye out for the software update in the next few weeks.

Turn-by-Turn Printable Maps

GPS devices are great, but often there’s nothing like having a printed copy of the directions. We made a few changes to use less paper and save trees and added Turn-by-Turn Maps to help guide you. When selected in Print Options, the Turn-by-Turn Maps and Directions will create a small map with text directions below for each turn of your trip. The map provides some context of the surrounding area.

Time Zone Detection

If you are taking a cross-country excursion, you may be passing through time zones. One of our latest features is Time Zone Detection. In all of our directions, if you cross a time zone, it will be mentioned.

Note: If you are planning a trip that will occur during Daylights Savings or back, we recommend you set the date for your trip in your Trip Properties to ensure schedule is accurate.

Find Nearby Drives, Outdoor Recreation, and Activities

Another new feature is to locate nearby Scenic Drives, Outdoor Recreation, and other Activities along your selected route. This feature is similar to Find Nearby Places of Interest but instead of focusing on all the content in one area, it allows you to search specific content along your entire route. This is a great way to find those not-to-be-missed activities along your route, and as myscenicdrives.com continues to grow, this experience will only get richer!

Get inspiration from Pictures

Pictures are worth a thousand words. Trying to decide between routes or choose stops along the way? Panoramio pictures are now available from the Map menu where you can see thousands of photos submitted from people who have been there.

Hotels for You

Choosing the right hotel requires some filtering. We’ve just added the ability to search by Amenity, making it simple to find a hotel with a pool, complimentary breakfast, pet-friendly, and more.

Foreign currency exchange rates on credit cards are not fun. To help our Canadian users avoid additional charges, we have just released the ability to book hotels in Canadian Dollars. For now, this service is only available on hotel purchases.

Thanks

Many of the features above have been inspired by you, our users. Thank you for your feedback and support. We are excited with this growing community of travelers that share our core belief — getting there is more than half the fun. Happy and safe travels!

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

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

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

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.

• Canyon Sweep
• Davis Mountains Loop
• Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive
• El Camino del Rio
• Texas Hill Country
• Devil’s Backbone

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

We are thrilled to release our biggest feature yet — our fully-integrated road trip planner. Just in time for this summer’s road trips, our free planner allows travelers to easily create personalized and detailed itineraries for day trips, weekend getaways or cross-country adventures.

Customize trips with an unlimited number of destinations using interactive maps and integrated search and myscenicdrives.com’s ever-growing list of scenic drives and recommended stops.

Edit, save and share trips with an easy-to-use interface. Print or export your plan to a wide variety of GPS devices. For multi-day trips, the planner automatically divides your excursion into comfortable daily itineraries and offers the ability to search and book nearby accommodations all through myscenicdrives.com.

Sign up for a free account and start using our road trip planner today. Hitting the road has never been this easy. Happy Travels.

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:

• Alpine Loop: Delve into Colorado’s mining history
• Colorado National Monument: The awe-inspiring Rim Rock Drive
• Colorado River Headwaters: Along the river that carved Arizona’s Grand Canyon
• Frontier Pathways Scenic Byway: A blend of many cultures
• Gold Belt Tour Scenic Byway: Literally rich in history
• Grand Mesa: The world’s largest mesa
• Peak to Peak Scenic Byway: Through Roosevelt National Forest to Rocky Mountain National Park
• Rocky Mountain National Park: 1,000 peaks over 10,000 feet of elevation
• San Juan Skyway: Drive to the top of the world
• Trail of the Ancients: Mesa Verde and Canyons of the Ancients
• Unaweep-Tabeguache Scenic Byway: Explore 2 billion years of geologic history

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