McDonald's Surprise

Periodically I run upon things that astound me. Not clever things, or complex things, just things that make a great deal of sense and probably should have been self-evident previously. In this case, the surprise came in a most unexpected place, namely McDonalds. Our 15 yr old son and I were going to take a quick trip to pick something up about 170 miles away in Cedar Rapids, IA and we would come right back. As the trek wasn't on an interstate, or similar, I was uncertain about what to expect along the way. Usually when we travel, we stop at McDonald's drive-thru's and are quickly back on the road. It's just our typical routine and I was interested in finding where Mickey D's were along the way to catch supper at some point. So, of course, I go to the McD's corporate website figuring that they have a restaurant locator that I could use. Lo and behold they had one, but they also had a trip planner. I expected to iteratively check for restaurants in the larger towns along the way, which would be somewhat time consuming. Instead the trip planner was much more like mapquest driving directions in that it had me enter the starting and ending points and it showed the route with McD's dutifully annotated along the way. It also had extra useful info like whether there was playland's and if it was a stand-alone store or not, which would be useful for the just hitting the drive-thru. Furthermore, it had the distances from your starting point to help plan which one you would stop at for the given target time. Absolutely brilliant and useful! The horrible thing is that now I will come to expect such good stuff from other restaurant sites and be pissed off if they don't have it.