Next big POI project

I just tried "Where to" > "Lodging" > "Spell" > "HILTON" on my Nuvi 350 and found all the Hilton hotels I would ever need.......

- JGRACEY

There are listings for Show Caves in Ky and Tn.
No wild caves have been listed.
Look at the alphabetical poi listing under "K"entucky Show Caves and "T"ennessee Show Caves.
There is also an Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas Show Cave poi listed under "A"rkansas

Umm ... "wild caves" as opposed to ... what? "tamed caves"?

;0

LoL

Show Caves are ones usually guided, with electricity / stairs etc.

Wild Caves would be ones usually w/o electricity which would require the old hardhat w/lamp and the need to do the belly crawl in a lot of areas. Not a place to be if claustrophobic.

I think the suggestion of locall attractions coupled with what a bus tour might encoumpus in the area is a good one. Take pride in your local major city and couple it with highlights of what a bus tour guide might also include.

I thought we completed all the Hilton hotels and their smaller counterparts. I remember doing this project, but cannot locate on the site.

Please advise or am I having another senior moment.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/5968

... and great accuracy in what you say and advise. If you ever think of running for President you'll have my vote for sure. You sure would get my vote more readily than any of the current crop of contenders.

GC

I read somewhere that about 50% of RV'ers travel with pets. Where do we go when we need pet grooming, special nutritional supplements, flea treatments, vaccinations or veterinary care and are not home--or if home is "on the road"?

I would love to see a database of veterinary clinics, hospitals etc.

I use to go spelunking (in "untamed" caves) a lot when I was a teenager with a family friend. I wish I could remeber where the caves were. Some were sort of scary though, real tight areas. "Pigs hole" (where they use to throw pig guts after slaughter in the 1800's) is the best one, after going for a couple of hours, you get to the opening and it sooooooo pretty with the moss and the sunlight. My coworkers and I were talking about it so I might start a poi. It is just that I am afraid that we may get lost, very easy to do. So if you don't hear from me for awhile, call the police...lol.

I know there are more RV'rs on here than just me.
Anyone creating a project of Woodall's Campground Directory or Trailer Life Campground Directory?

I called Woodall's to see if the long/lat were available and they didn't know what I was talking about or didn't want to give any info.

I am willing to help with the project if anyone wants to work with this. It will be time consuming I am sure.

Cassie,
We travel with a dog... miniature Maltese, so far, we have not had a problem finding Petco stores. One thing about the Petco, they have a card whereby buy 10 get one free.

I think there is a POI file on here for Petco.

A listing of food & drink manufactures who provide tours (aka: free samples) might be good.

The next logical(?) move would be to take that file and try driving across a state (the entire us?) and never paying for food or drink.

Hmmm.... wonder how much vacation I have saved

I can help you on this file. Have you started yet?

I'm very seriously considering a huge project of making POI's for all mountains greater than 4000 or 5000' for southern Cal. I think I would also list shorter ones if they're all by themselves, like Mt Orizaba @ 2000' on Catalina.

Does anyone else want to participate?

Worked on this last week and submited the Tire Factory this AM. Enjoy!

I am surprised at all the people that enjoy going Goodwill hunting.

I would like to start a list (or two) and help with some of the Florida lists but I don't know if I will get to it until after the start of the new year. Work and the holidays will keep me busy.

I couple of ideas might be related to American Automobile Association (AAA). This might include a listing of local offices by state or a file of AAA apporved repair facilities. Another idea might be AAA rated and approved hotels or restaurants. The downside of these last two files is that they would have to be periodically updated as rating changed.

Just a thought. Hope it helps.

Along that line of thought, I emailed Best Western tonight, and unbelievably, on a weekend night, I got a quick response, and I quote:

"Thank you for contacting Best Western International. Currently, Best Western's Internet site does allow a guest to make a reservation online in a geographic area. However, we do not have the programming in place that would allow a GPS file to be downloaded through our Web site. It is a programming issue that we are working on and hope to enable this option in the future."

So, it looks like they are working on their own DB to share with the public....

This comment has been moved here.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/3247

I am currently working on all B of A's in the US. It is a very big list and will take a while. You will probably notice there are 1-5 new BofA's being put in there a week.

There are hotels pre-loaded but if you look up hotels in your area, you will get the closest 50 hotels from where you are at. What if you just want to stay at a Hilton lets say. If you have the custom POI for just Hiltons and look it up, it will only show the closest Hiltons, not all the rest.

Caves is a real tough one to do. I put together all the show caves. I am working on other caves throughout the US but most real Cavers will not give out the coordinates for open caves.

I know I have been working on a Frisbee Golf course POI which includes Local Club Contact info for tee times and match play, as well as retailers..So far I have Colorado, Michigan, Florida, and Washington DC area..

Maybe we should have a special area on this site that shows what projects are being worked on and who is doing it. That way, no duplication is done. Just a thought.

I like the idea of a link to ongoing projects that may inspire greater collaboration on this site.

I'd like to see a link for the large shopping Outlet Malls. Preferably ones with sports bars close by so I can drop off the wife for some shopping and I can visit!

UPDATE:
I have had a very inquiries about these files in progress. Just to let you (and them) know that it is coming along. There are approx 900 arenas/rinks in Ontario and about 360 in Quebec.

I have them in 2 spreadsheets and I am capturing the NAME, DESCRIPTION, STREET, CITY, PROV, POSTAL CODE and PHONE for each. I have completed over 700 for Ontario and Quebec is also started. I will then need to geocode the files.

Hang in there, with any luck, I hope to have the files within a week or two.

My LG unit has a pre-installed listing of most Hotel chains I have read so far within this lengthy post.

Is there any way I can export this list onto Excel?

Hmmmm, LG allows you to refine the search for a specific Hotel within a specific radius (5, 40 and 80 kms) of any given location. I can't recall if my Garmin was capable of doing this.

I completely agree with GC0110 The idea of going to a city and having a bunch of locally created POI's to visit as apposed to just "looking around" sounds very appealing.

I've seen sites where you can get lat/lon for some of the more remote/unlisted caves. I'll have to let you do your own searching for those since I can't remember when or where I saw them.

How about marinas? I've seen the boat ramp file and I think it would be nice to be able to pop the gps on the boat windshield and have all of the local on water stops listed as well.

Anything on Commerce Banks in the NY/NJ area?

I know that im new to this website but i think that the next big project should be listing all of the gander mountains. I am an outdoor person, and I travel all over the east coast fishing tounaments and being able to get to an outdoor store to find tackle the night before a tournament is a plus for me. I really appreciate seeing all of the bass pro shops listed along with cabelas and walmart's. they will really help me in the future since i just got a garmin c330 for christmas from my girlfriend. thank you all of you for all of your hard work.

I only know one close by where I live. It is in Reston, Virginia one block north of Baron Camorn Dr. on Whiele avenue. I hate to trash the only dog park I know of in my area but it is about an acre of blue stone mixed gravel and dust. I wish I could have something better to say about a wonderful comunity but ... Oh well

There is a great one called the Spanish Ball
Room at Glen Echo Park in the Washington D.C. metro area. Live bands, swing dance and ballroom lessons a great crowd. The people make it glow!!

Not sure if anyone has made an attempt to start a US Ski Resorts or ski mountains POI. Living near Wisconsin I know that there are ski resorts and plenty of them. Instead of having just one region we should do one for the entire US.

Some of these old, but useful poi's probably could use an update.

Maybe concentrate on ones that are 6 months old and older.

I could not agree more about the updates. I have been busy this year already updated some of mine thanks to many of you whom have notified me of ones to delete or add. Thanks! I welcome the chalenge.

The LN740 has a listing of all the little chains out there.....it helps when you have over 7 million POI's on a unit.

If only I could figure out how to extract those POI's for my Garmin and all you other users out there... The file has a format of: XXXX.POI

Hotel/Motel Chains-

The number of possibilities is almost endless.

one sub-category is the ability to drive to one's door. I hate loading a cart and dragging it to elevators, etc.

We like Super 8 but many Super 8's enroute to Texas from Wpg. are the two story, all interior room doors, style. No thanks.

I received an email yesterday from an employee of Wyndham Hotel Group saying that they would like to be represented in our catalog.

This is exciting that the companies are starting to come to us now. They even geocoded the file for me, I should be getting it sometime soon.

Miss POI

I'd be much more interested in a big POI project of something that's not easily found on Googlemaps or another directory website. Doing all locations of a well-known business seems less valuable, since that information is so readily available.

I saw a comment about listing caves earlier in the thread, that would be a good one. Anything by locals who know an area would be useful (e.g. hot spots to eat/drink in a particular city, a tour of locations used to shoot a movie, local landmarks of interest). What about locations of famous peoples' graves?

Maybe, in addition to red lights, we could do intersections with really short yellow lights? Or other hazards? A list of all police stations so you know to slow down near them?

This speaks volumes about the quality of this site.

Have you made any progress on this? I can get you some Maryland State Police locations...

Or so I won't slow down... I don't want to get caught:)

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/5193

I've never laughed so hard because it is so true....I think we can all agree on Dunkin Donuts!!