To map out your next driving trip, look to the Web

NEW YORK - Remember the old song "500 Miles Away From Home"? Think of it as a challenge instead of a lament, and you could come up with some good ideas for a road trip.

You can do it the old-fashioned way, calculating distances on a paper map using scale of miles and a ruler. But now there are free online map radius tools that show you at a glance which destinations are within a given distance.

One that's relatively simple to use is at www.freemaptools.com/

radius-around-point.htm.

Go to the Web site and scroll down to the "Options" form. Type in the city you're starting from in "Place radius by location name."

Skip latitude and longitude and go to the "Radius Distance" section. Here the form automatically sets the radius distance to 1,000 kilometers, but you can reset by typing in the number of miles you're willing to drive in the "miles" box right next to the kilometer box.

Now go back up to the location name and click on "Draw Radius."

Scroll up to see the green circle on the map. Zoom in by grabbing the minus sign on the left and moving it up a couple of notches for a more detailed look at cities within your drive-to zone.

Depending on traffic and highway speed, most people can easily cover 500 miles in a day's drive, so starting with that distance could inspire some interesting choices. If you're taking a week's vacation, driving the first and last days to and from your destination is often an acceptable trade-off to save on plane fare.

Starting with New York as a radius point on the FreeMapTools.

com Web site, you quickly see that trips to Montreal, Toronto, Cleveland and Virginia Beach, Va., are well within the 500-mile radius.

Destinations at the very edge of the circle may be farther than your maximum distance once you calculate actual driving routes. The radius tool measures distance as the crow flies without considering highways or terrain, so it's good to check distances against a mileage calculator on MapQuest or GoogleMaps.

Calculating from Philadelphia, the radius goes through Cincinnati; Asheville, N.C.; and almost to Charleston, S.C., to the west and south. The northward radius reaches past Montreal almost to Quebec City and well into Maine.

If you're willing to make the seven- to 10-hour drive, the cost savings of a 500-mile road trip versus flying are considerable. For one person, it's not that much, but a family of four is likely to spend more than $1,000 flying anywhere round-trip.

In contrast, with gas around $2 a gallon, driving 1,000 miles in a car that gets 25 mpg will cost you well under $100. Even counting tolls, food and a night in a motel en route if you can't make the trip in a day, it's bound to run less than plane tickets. If you're feeling ambitious, leave before dawn and you can easily get to a destination 400 miles away by lunchtime.

While using a map radius can expand your list of potential vacation spots, the appeal is partly psychological. Many people are not good at estimating distances, and knowing exactly how far away something is can make it seem more attainable. *