[gps-talkusers] searching for cities or areas

I was riding with family in a car yesterday and a discussion came up about good places to have a vacation home. People started throwing out possible cities or areas. Someone mentioned the town of Cool California but we weren't quite sure where it was.
I had two ways I could search for Cool on my GPS. I tried an address match and Cool was not found. Then I did a search for Cool in the POI city category and found it. I set my virtual position to Cool and saw that it was 29 miles north of my current GPS position. I switched to Virtual mode and did another city search for 5 miles from Cool and found the city of Auburn, which was familiar to all of us.
We next wondered if there were any lakes in that area so I did a search on the word lake and found everything from Lake street to Blake's auto service. I did find a couple real lakes too.
Many of the extra POIs with the G N I S term have lakes, springs and summits. You can often find the elevation of the G N I S items too. So I did a search on the word lake in the Bonus category as well as a search on the 4-letter term GNIS.
With a little bit of ingenuity, I was able to do some very quick and useful geographic research, far more effective than someone poring over a print map. I located a lake in the foothills that sounded like a fun place to check out next time we took a weekend drive to explore.
If ever you don't find a city match, use that POI City category to get yourself virtually to the right area and then use the C key to see what City name is used for the address matching index. 

Mike



Michael G. May

CEO Sendero Group

Crashing Through by Robert Kurson available at http://www.CrashingThrough.com

Developers and distributors of the first-ever accessible GPS
Distributing BrailleNote, VoiceNote, Talks, Miniguide and the ID Mate bar code reader 

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http://www.SenderoGroup.com

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