I feel your pain. We have tried to work through that and have developed a system that works pretty well for us. First we decide what route we plan to travel. We then look at it in our Garmin. We have several choices in our unit. If one of those is not what we want we just enter shorter distances. Another words we do not enter the entire 500 miles. We program it to go say 100 miles to a given town and then put in a new address from there. By doing this we can take the desired route and not spend our viewing time looking at a map. Just a thought.