Post #48471 by thejab on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 1:51 PM

Dawn, $300 is a great deal! I wasn't trying to contradict that. I was just explaining that when I went to Hawaii I wanted to stay longer and stay in certain places which weren't offered by the package companies. Just my highly opinionated self :)

Please, more discussion about travel and tikis. The political threads are getting me down. Well, not very down as I'm damn excited about Exotica in Chicago!

Speaking of traveling, I just got this program called Microsoft Streets and Trips 2004. I wouldn't normally gush about a computer program especially one by Microsoft, but this one is a great buy for $25 (after rebate)!

It's somewhat like Yahoo maps and yellow pages but all the data resides on your hard drive (which takes up about 1G) so you don't need to be online to use it, and it's faster than web sites.

It basically has detailed maps for the entire world with data on hotels, restaurants, banks, museums, landmarks, ATMs, gas stations, and loads of other places. You can create travel routes by linking places with full directions and time scheduling. It also downloads any construction info about your route when your online.

You can search for places by name and it's fast - I did "tiki" and came up with all kinds of places around the world, some that I have never heard about. Even Tiki Gardens came up as a landmark! How cool is that? In Chicago it didn't have the Hala Kahiki (strange) but it did have Chef Shangri-la and all 3 Tong's locations and Malahini Terrace. Every place in the database has an address and phone number. It's a great tool to go with Tiki Road Trip. You can even import a database so if one were to enter all the data from Tiki Road Trip into Excel one could have a mapping database of tiki bars!

The only drawback is that it's not the most beautiful map, cartographically speaking, but I am impressed by the legibility of it at different scales.

I'm bringing my laptop with this on it during my trip to Exotica and on the road.