Experience from 10000km round trip to Nordkapp

Richard Watson

Did a 3 week round trip from the UK up through France/Belgium/Holland/Denmark/Germany, all the way up through Norway and back via Finland and Sweden in August and thought my experiences might be useful. Overall very impressed and now I'm used to it, think the routeplanner is fantastic. I created one long route for the main legs of the journey with the key places we wanted to visit and then copied it and edited down to smaller legs with more details on the exact route, then the same again to have a separate route for each day with accomodation stops on. Not sure if that's the recommended way to do it, but it made it run nice and quick and you can clearly see the distance/time to the end of each day.

I had one or two issues with the navigation part (v4.0.3 if it helps) which I'm sure can easily be fixed:

After some severe storms in Norway some roads were closed. We were keeping a close eye on the roads website and the route we were planning to take was due to open again later that afternoon, so we wanted to stick to our original plan. Despite the planned route being clear which way we wanted to go, once we loaded it up in the navigation app it wanted to take a completely different route to avoid the closure. There was no warning of this and had I not noticed that the overall route plan was different, we would have been taken in a totally different direction. I'm assuming this is something to do with data the base map picks up about road closures? If this happens it would be good to flag it to the user and give the option to follow the diverted route or stick to the original one. Got round this by making a copy of the route and just shortening it to the closed point, then continuing from there.
Battery usage - seems to be mentioned by a number of people. Not a huge problem for us as I just charged my phone overnight but it did get very hot in use and then got quite slow and laggy at times.
When recording the route we took, after a few days we seemed to get more and more crashes of the app. Starting it again would prompt to save or discard the route and it would continue for a while again, before crashing again. Ended up turning off the route recording and the crashes stopped. Not sure if it was running out of memory due to the length of the route? Not a massive problem as I wasn't that fussed about keeping the exact route we took (there aren't that many roads in Norway anyway!).
A couple of times the next instruction/direction at the top of the screen froze whilst the rest of the map continued fine. Missed a junction or two because of this as we thought we weren't at the required junction just yet. Not a massive problem, we just took the next junction and it caught up after that. May be linked to 2) and 3) above whilst the phone was getting hot and the app crashed at times.
When loading a route in landscape mode it doesn't always allow you to see or press the Start Navigation button, but does when you spin it to portrait mode. Annoying when I've put the phone in the car mount but again probably a simple fix.
Minor one but when you go into Routes it always defaults to the top level. I've sorted mine into folders for multiple trips and it would be good if it resumed in the folder you last used as that's where you're likely to want to resume from next time you open the app?

Hope those are useful to the developers - I was impressed overall and found the map view, instructions and time/distance to the next waypoint really clear (better than Google maps and Waze).

Richard

Stanisław

I agree with your point 6, it would be great to go by default to the last used folder to get next part of the multi-day trip.

Corjan Meijerink

@Richard-Watson Glad you are enjoying the app!

We could investigate if we could add a warning if the route deviates from the one you originally planned - if there however is a road closure, we cannot force the app to take the road.
Correct, working on this.
Interesting! After how long did this occur? Is there any reason why you didn't just save the tracklog after each day?
Thanks
That highly depends on the screen size. You can always scroll down a bit to press the button.
Interesting suggestion!

Drabslab

@Richard-Watson

10 000 km; my god, that makes my 2800 km from this summer pale

Con Hennekens

@Drabslab, I think I will keep my mileage to myself...

Stephen Rowland

@Stanisław also sortin alphabetically and numerically on the title would be useful. Then Day 1 Day 2 etc would be in order

Drabslab

@Con-Hennekens said in Experience from 10000km round trip to Nordkapp:

@Drabslab, I think I will keep my mileage to myself...

Better or you may totally depress an old man

But hey, Grossglockner, Pordoi, Col Gardena, Hahntjesjoch, Brenner and a few of he lesser gods in the Dolomites ... with two on the motorcycle ...

I now also know that my horse can swim. Driving through 10(?) centimeters of water for xx kilometers during a thunderstorm in the mountains is a special experience.

I am quite happy about my trip.

Con Hennekens

@Drabslab said in Experience from 10000km round trip to Nordkapp:

Better or you may totally depress an old man

I wish I could depress anyone with my mileage... Probably only myself
Sounds like a great trip, certainly an area I'd like to explore!

Stanisław

@Stephen-Rowland said in Experience from 10000km round trip to Nordkapp:

@Stanisław also sortin alphabetically and numerically on the title would be useful. Then Day 1 Day 2 etc would be in order

It seems to be sorted by name on my side, I can change it to ascending/descending. The problem is that I must first go to the correct folder.

Drabslab

@Con-Hennekens said in Experience from 10000km round trip to Nordkapp:

@Drabslab said in Experience from 10000km round trip to Nordkapp:

Better or you may totally depress an old man

I wish I could depress anyone with my mileage... Probably only myself
Sounds like a great trip, certainly an area I'd like to explore!

the Grossglockner can be recommended; especially to stop regulary along the road and admire the view.

Doing the Grossglockner with two people on a 50cc scooter as I saw a German couple try, is not recommendable. It leads to exploded engines and a very expensive trip back to the hotel.

Stephen Rowland

@Stanisław Thanks - Ijust realised i can do it. I'm happy now

Michael Rhys

@Corjan-Meijerink We definitely need an Alert if a road is closed. Tomtom does this. It is up to us to fix the issue, but we do need to know ! I tend to check for road closures on tomtom mydrive, then if there are issues fix in MRA then use MRA to navigate, be much better if MRA Navigation Next, told us when we opened a route there was a closure.