Finding gas stops - any tricks?

Matt_Colie wrote:
Ready Mickey?

You need gasoline not diesel, so many truck stops will be of no use as they think only passcars use gasoline.

It goes like this. (It is what I do regularly.)
You need:
A smartphone that can be a hotspot or the single device that does.
A laptop
An old (there are no new) copy of Street Atlas or Streets and Trips. It will be useless for actual navigation because the charts are so old. But, hang on here.

Get the program running on the laptop and use it to do you base plan. Be sure to fill in the fuel data. Now, it will tell you where you should be looking for fuel (they build in some reserve).

On the laptop, fire the browser to GasBuddy. Use that to locate the good price about that location. Also look just across state lines (i.e. Don't buy fuel in Michigan, Illinois etc). Sometimes you may want to fuel 50~100 miles sooner to save the money.

When you have a fuel stop target, then fire up Google Earth and look at the possible fuel stops from over head. If one is interesting, but problematic, go to Street View and see what you think.

Now that you have bought fuel, put the stop in your plan on the laptop so it can effective guess your next stop.

If you have a dedicated navigator onboard, this can take a lot of load off the driver and make travel more relaxing. If you do, you will also want a 150watt inverter to run the laptop from the vehicle 12V.

This is what we have been doing for 20+ years right along with the technology upgrades. Now with there being no replacement for SA and S&T, it is more difficult, but it is still not too tough.

There is a free website called Furkot that can do a lot of this, but it is web-based and not much use on the red roads out west or anyplace else without good data coverage.

Matt