YCGL - Minnesota - Day 25 - Wednesday , May 11 - Ansley, NE - 157

 I have an app that is an "RV Friendly" GPS.   It has two parts, the planning feature on your computer and the GPS/Map feature on your phone. It makes sense, kind of.  You use the computer to lay out your trip.  It has a cool feature that shows you driving distances from a place.  For example:

The green is 100 miles, the gold is 200 miles and the red is 300 miles.  So you select your distance and then select campgrounds out around that circle.  I'm trying to stay at two hundred miles a day, so I search around the gold circle.  Pick the campground from their database or from several others like Harvest Host.  Do that around where you want to go and you have your trip set up.

Then when you travel, you use the app on your phone and it gives you the segment of the trip appropriate for that day at your starting and end point.  And that is the problem.  Where I stayed last night didn't have enough signal to download the segment map for the day.  So I used Google Maps to drive to a town on the way to the next location.  Finally, the GPS app got enough signal and routed the daily segment for me.  The problem was that I was not at the location where it wanted me to start, so it routed me backwards to the starting point and then selected a different route, much longer, to get to my destination.  In one segment, I was driving west on US30.  In the middle of a small town, it told me to turn right onto a cross street.  It then told me three more right turns, so I drove around a block for no reason and it then sent me back onto the HiWay and on.  

It also only allows you to select a segment for the day you are scheduled to travel.  For example, I decided to leave Minneapolis a day early and drive to St. Cloud.  It wouldn't allow me to open that segment a day early.  So the RV Friendly GPS system can be (and is) a pain in the butt.  A love/hate relationship for sure.

But, by hook and crook,  I finally got to my destination, the 4 County Beef Ranch, a Harvest Host location.  It was my third Harvest Host (I said two before, but it was the second on this trip) and I was their first camper.  So everything was new to each of us.  I pulled in to their designated area between two barns and drove up to the house and introduced myself.  After I ate, they came by and drove me on a tour of the ranch where they discussed the joy and sorrow of ranching with a very variable weather.  They had just gotten their first rain since December a week ago, and the fields are just turning green.  

He is also a large animal veterinarian.

I enjoyed meeting them, seeing their operation and I'm looking forward to the two steaks I purchased!  And I would be happy to stay with them again.