Spring and summer is the time most of us travel to see family and friends at the other end of the country. But do you know the way? We recommend the best route-finders.

SO are you off somewhere nice this bank holiday? More importantly, do you know how to get there? Once upon a time we followed our noses or stopped to look at road signs. Stop on a main road to ponder a road sign these days and you could cause a multi-vehicle pile up in the time you've found a place name that's vaguely familiar.

There are maps, of course, the best guide of all. But even maps can be confusing when there's a tangle of roads round the edge of a city, or a tiny village could be any one of four different blobs on the page. And the place you want is always on the fold...

Satellite navigation - known in this house as the Map Fairy - is a wonderful invention. And so soothing. If you miss a turning, the Map Fairy doesn't scream and shout at you and bang the dashboard in fury, but just takes a sort of electronic deep breath and calmly re-directs you, like a very patient infant teacher.

However, even map fairies aren't that magic, as we discovered once when ours tried to get us to join the A1 up the exit slip road.

Portable GPS systems - a hand-held map fairy - are available at around £400, but there are also some more basic route finders, which don't tell you where you are, but as long as you know that, they'll tell you how to get somewhere else.

But the easiest way to plan your journey is to use one of the many free services offered on the Internet

So we turned to the Internet to plan our route in advance. There are a number of free sites that will offer you a map plus door-to-door route, based on an address or a postcode.

Some, but not all, give you little maps of individual junctions - very useful, for instance, when you're negotiating round the edge of Manchester.

Some will let you avoid places or a particular motorway, or even all motorways, if you'd rather travel in your own little timewarp.

We asked each one to get us from north east England to south west Wales - a journey we do regularly. And we also asked it how to get from Scotch Corner to Gosforth without using the A1.

They wouldn't all have got us there...

OUR FAVOURITE

THE RAC

www.rac.co.uk/routeplanner

ABSOLUTELY, knocks spots off everyone else. This site has everything. It's very quick, very clear and tells you in colour what sort of road you're driving on - sounds daft, but very useful when you're en route. On every junction it can give you a quick map of roundabouts, etc. Works from address or postcode and directs you straight to the door.

From Scotch Corner to Newcastle without using the A1 it took us on the A68, A167 and through the centre of Newcastle.

THE AA

www.theaa.co.uk

ANOTHER very good one. Does everything the RAC does, just as well, just as quickly and perhaps is slightly clearer in telling you which road you're on. But it doesn't offer pop-up maps of each junction. Very good at avoiding motorways - gave us a wonderful route to south west Wales, which took me straight back to my pre-motorway childhood.

192.COM

www.192.com

WELL this didn't get us very far - literally. Absolutely hopeless. If you live on a street, you're OK - live in the middle of nowhere and you've had it. When we tried to get to Wales it told us "Sorry, there is no route for this available". Didn't seem able to work off postcodes.

The directions were very basic, just a map of the entire route - no individual maps. No way of avoiding motorways.

GREEN FLAG

www.greenflag.co.uk

VERY quick, but fairly basic. Worked off postcodes, but although directions were perfectly legible, they weren't quite as startlingly clear as the AA or RAC. Didn't seem possible to avoid motorways, and as for maps of individual junctions, we either had to have them all, which took ages, or none.

MAPQUEST

www.mapquest.com

AN American site, so we didn't have great expectations. Very much a town-to-town route finder, ie Richmond to Haverfordwest rather than Middleton Tyas to Solva. No villages no postcodes. No diversions.

But it had excellent click-on maps for every junction, the clearest of the lot.

TRAVEL MACHINE

£79.99

A POCKET calculator-sized route planner that's a bit fiddly, but quite easy to use once you're used to it. Type in the start and end of your journey and it will display the route - and it's quite easy to click up and down it.

This, too, is a place-to-place route planner - no streets, which makes it especially tricky for cities. Though they say that they will be introducing more detailed versions.

You can avoid towns with this fairly easily. Avoiding motorways is a bit more tricky - you have to key in each individual stretch, which gets very boring.

Because you're using a matchbox-sized screen in black and grey, it's nowhere near as clear or as easy to follow as the routes printed up from the Internet. You can print up from this, but you need a separate connector plus a computer.

But the joy of this one is that you can take it with you, keep it in the car. And if you get lost/change your mind/want to go somewhere else, you can soon be on the right road again.

Enjoy your travels...