Why we use Google Maps on our RV Trip Across America

Continue on I-10 West for 312 miles. We use Google Maps for our directions for a lot of reasons. It shows you which lane to be in at the very top of the map. So like that was a five lane deal. And there was I-10 West to El Paso and you know it has the three right lanes lit up. So we know which lane to be in. Without that I don't know how we would know which lane to be in. I also found out how to turn on or off tolls in Google Maps. And let me tell you something. It's not intuitive. What you'll need to do is when you put in your destination from your current location to where you're going then before you hit the blue triangle what you want to do is go up at the top and you'll see three you'll see three little dots next to your current location. Click that and a whole bunch of settings will come up. And in there there'll be an option for advanced settings. You can turn it on or turn it off. I'll turn on avoid tolls and then I'll see where it routes me and I'll get an ETA. Then I'll turn it off and I'll go back in there and I'll see if the ETA is anywhere near or close to it and then we'll get a sense for you know if basically it's the same ETA I'll just avoid the toll. But if it's going to save an hour I'll take the toll. So that's how we've been using it of late. But out here in Texas it's not a huge issue. In Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Chicago you definitely want to be leveraging the toll. Real time will update traffic and accidents. So basically the route that you're on will turn red or yellow based upon certain traffic and based upon that it will know the direction you're going and give you alternate routes in advance. Unless you're in New York or LA and it's just red all the time. We have found that to be very handy and we have tested it a lot too. So we would look over and we would see the freeway starting to slow down and I'd look on my maps and sure enough on that side of the freeway it would start to turn orange and then we would see it stop and we would look on the map and it would turn red. Here's one more thing that Google Maps does really well. As we're driving the low fuel light has an easy way to find a gas station or anything while you're on your way on Google Maps. Let me show you how to do that. You click the search button and in the search button you can type in Starbucks, you can type in a hotel, you can type in Cabela's or Walmart or you can take the pre-selected which would be like gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores, etc. So I went ahead and selected gas stations and then all the gas stations come up on the route which is great because how many times back in the day would you want to find something and it would say that you know a gas station is three miles away but it's the wrong direction. So all the gas stations come up you can push the gas station and then it tells you how far away it is and then you simply hit add to stop or cancel and keep in mind if you don't hit add to stop within a certain amount of certain period of time it will add it for you anyway and then to remove that you just hit the X at the bottom of the screen which by the way is showing you the new ETA of the stop and it gives you the price of the gas. No way, really? Yeah, it's pretty cool. Google Maps has got their together.