Rand McNally 7710 GPS

After the waypoints are entered in to your GPS, chose "show route." That will show you instantly if you are zig-zagging all over the place. If you are than it is a simple thing to change the waypoint order.

I think that if you know the addresses for all of these yard sales from history, the use of a GPS is not necessary.

bumpy

My (Magellan) GPS can optimize the order of waypoints in a trip to have the "shortest" distance, independent of the routing algorithm between the waypoints. I think the button is labeled "optimize trip" or something like that. I assume it's basing the ordering on straight-line distances as the crow flies, not on road distances; but that at least keeps one from going from Philadelphia to Baltimore via Orlando.

The traveling salesman problem is not so much impossible to solve as there is no known way to do so short of an exhaustive search...in other words, to get the optimum solution, you need to try every possible permutation of your stops. For a relatively small number of stops, that's not really a problem even for the little computer in a GPS. There are plenty of heuristic ways to get a decent solution in practice (but not necessarily the single best solution) much more efficiently.

I don't know of any GPS that will solve the Travelling Salesman Problem (automatically reordering multiple waypoints into the least distance round trip route), however there are some sites built on top of Google Maps that say they do the job. A quick search turned up RouteXL as one possibility. You are even supposed to be able to download a GPX file which you can load into a GPS as a pre-computed route.

Good luck.

As mentioned, you can set up multiple waypoints for your garage sale locations and enter "shortest route" BUT, this is OK if you use your toad ONLY. In your coach, using the shortest route mode, the GPS may send you down roads where your coach might not fit.
Once you use the GPS to show the route, you can adjust the waypoint order to make the most sense.

rk911 wrote:

want-a-be wrote:
Is there a way this GPS can be program to put in order multiple yard sales so you don’t have to drive back and forth?
Thanks for all comments!

when I program multiple stops into our RM in-dash GPS system it allows me to put them in a particular order. do you have a multi-stop option on your gps?

Since we are in a unfamiliar area where we don’t know where all the streets or we can not put the yard sales in order.

My GPS allows me to enter 'way points' and then recalculates the shortest route as I've set it for 'shortest' routing. But, I need the addresses or I can tap points on the map for that sort of thing.

It's a worldwide standard mapping setup that most GPS mappers have so although your GPS might name it differently, it likely allows multiple stops on one trip routing...somehow.

Since they are all different though, probably best to find and download the users guide for yours.

BTW, got my GPS on eBay for $50. Has a 7" screen. Bus routing setup. Pretty cool.

want-a-be wrote:
Is there a way this GPS can be program to put in order multiple yard sales so you don’t have to drive back and forth?
Thanks for all comments!

when I program multiple stops into our RM in-dash GPS system it allows me to put them in a particular order. do you have a multi-stop option on your gps?

well if you have the addresses of the sales, sure, but if not only magic will do what you want done.
bumpy

I don't know the answer to your question but this is a classic Computer Science problem I remember studying over 40 years ago known as the Traveling Salesman algorithm. I could write code to solve it. ;)