It must have been the late 80s when my parents briefly had a AAA membership, and I remember going with my dad to pick up a Triptic for a vacation.
I'd never imagined something like that, so I thought it was a very excellent thing at the time as the clerk skillfully explained how to use it. My dad was more reluctant to deal with this kind of help.
We only ever used it once, since my dad felt that he was sufficiently expert at reading maps that he didn't need Triptics.
Unfortunately, he expected everyone else around him to be as expert with maps as he was, and he was the one who was doing the driving.
Usually, this combined to mean that family vacations were syncopated with the car being angrily slung onto the shoulder of the freeway in the space between an exit ramp and the driving lanes, where words were exchanged between the driver and the navigator.
And if handled right, good GPS nav almost completely resolves that situation.
But you're right: It does lead to bland road trips. I find the routes to be pretty unmemorable and fatiguing at times. This is a bummer because travelling can take up so much time in a vacation -- it'd be nice if there were something more memorable than an endless ribbon of uninterrupted pavement.
(And one solution for that is the "Avoid Highways" function in the navigation software. When the boredom and fatigue begin to set in, use this button to just get the hell off of the freeway and see what the area is about.
It takes time, but I think it is worth making time to do this occasionally.)
One reason I'm not eager to ever have an EV - you can't really do the "avoid highways" thing on a non-trivial EV roadtrip, so you're doomed to Interstates...
Just to posit some numbers: If there's 80 miles of range left, and it is 20 miles to the next charger, but mashing the "avoid highways" button makes that next charger 40 miles away instead: I think I wouldn't hesitate to get off of the highway if I felt it would be useful or fun right now.
I'll hypothetically arrive at a charger with ~40 miles of range remaining instead of ~60. Ain't so bad. I do similar risk assessments when driving long distances on gasoline and detouring from my planned route to mix things up.
Now, of course: There's a decent chance that the charger is broken or slow and being SOL, whereas gas is much more available. That's potentially pretty ugly, and it's ugly in ways that running low/out of gas isn't:
It's easy to score some gas in semi-rural anywhere-USA by knocking on a few doors, being polite, and having a bit of cash. (Some people are complete dicks, but I insist that most people are generally good and I am willing to die on this hill.)
Or: I have cheap roadside assistance. They'll bring me a small amount of gas anywhere...eventually...as a part of the service that I pay for by the month.
It's probably also easy enough to ask nicely to use an extension cord to juice up an EV, but that's a ton slower than dumping in a couple of gallons of gasoline is.
And due to limited range, it's more likely to happen with an EV than ICE.
But meh. It's still useful to go on a mini-adventure sometimes. One just needs to take everything into consideration.
And it'll get easier for EV drivers to do this as time moves on.
I'd never imagined something like that, so I thought it was a very excellent thing at the time as the clerk skillfully explained how to use it. My dad was more reluctant to deal with this kind of help.
We only ever used it once, since my dad felt that he was sufficiently expert at reading maps that he didn't need Triptics.
Unfortunately, he expected everyone else around him to be as expert with maps as he was, and he was the one who was doing the driving.
Usually, this combined to mean that family vacations were syncopated with the car being angrily slung onto the shoulder of the freeway in the space between an exit ramp and the driving lanes, where words were exchanged between the driver and the navigator.
And if handled right, good GPS nav almost completely resolves that situation.
But you're right: It does lead to bland road trips. I find the routes to be pretty unmemorable and fatiguing at times. This is a bummer because travelling can take up so much time in a vacation -- it'd be nice if there were something more memorable than an endless ribbon of uninterrupted pavement.
(And one solution for that is the "Avoid Highways" function in the navigation software. When the boredom and fatigue begin to set in, use this button to just get the hell off of the freeway and see what the area is about.
It takes time, but I think it is worth making time to do this occasionally.)