Here’s a hopefully good example of where the use of announced via points (ie points on a map where you have told the device you must go through) along with the ‘skip function’ and recalculation do work well together.
I wanted to go about 150 miles across rural France on D roads, then take a motorway for maybe an hour, to then leave the motorway to finish the journey by taking about 20 miles of D roads again to my final destination. I didn’t have my MacBook with me, so I could not create a bespoke route, but I did have my iPad and Navigator 6. I opened up ViaMichelin on the iPad to give me the map I needed, using it to find the roads I wanted to ride along and (more importantly) the villages and towns along the way. I started my Nav 6 and told it that I wanted to create a new route, starting from the hotel I was sitting in. I then inserted each village and town in sequence all the way along, up to and including my final destination. As I do not have ‘avoid motorways’ set as a default on my device, it jumped me onto the motorway at the right point and took me off at the right point, too. Between each town and village, there were no shaping points. There didn’t need to be any as the clear list of place names forced the route along the roads I wanted it to take.
Now comes the key bits....
When you enter towns and villages into the device in route creation it (not surprisingly perhaps) uses the centre of the place as its destination. Sometimes this works well (when the centre is on the road and in the direction you want to take) and sometimes not so well, when the centre is off the route you want to ride, meaning you’d have to pass through it and then turn around. This is a common complaint on these pages, where bods moan that their device routes them through a town (which they have asked the device to take them to) instead of taking the ring road. Riding along I could see on the screen when this was about to happen. Say for example there was a T-Junction where the direction of the route I wanted to take was to turn left but the centre of the village was to the right. If I followed the magenta route blindly, I’d be turning right, not left, riding to the centre and then turning around again, which would just be silly and self-inflicted.
Rather than turning right, I approached the T-junction and then hit the ‘skip’ button. Immediately and correctly, the device dropped the instruction to turn right and turned me left, taking me on to the next announced via point, along exactly the roads I wanted it to take. Each skip requires a recalculation but as there was in effect only ‘one road‘ between each of the villages and towns it was bound to recalculate properly. The only thing I needed to be reasonably sensible about was when to hit the ‘skip’ button. Hit it too early and then a significant deviation in the route might occur. Wait until the T-junction or on a close approach to it and all is well.
In reality this is no different to the old method of writing down place names on a sheet of paper, along with a handwritten instruction to ‘Turn left at T-junction to xxxx’. You wouldn’t turn right, at the junction. All you are doing with the good use of the ‘skip’ function, is telling the device not to turn right. Of course I could have fine tuned the route on the device’s map screen to force the route into a left turn at the T-junction but that is time consuming. Using the ‘skip’ function properly and allowing a logical recalculation to take place worked perfectly over a self-created route of say 240 miles, including a lot of small D roads.
As ever, the advice is, play around with your device and get used to how it works. It, along with BaseCamp, is very powerful but incredibly dumb at the same time. It can and will only do what you tell it to do but sometimes what it does is not what you think it should do. More often than not, that is down to you.
PS When inserting place names from a map, sometimes two or more share the same name. Just take a bit of care to chose the right one.