[Minneapolis Good/bad Areas]

I'll try...

 

Depending on your lifestyle I'll recommend a few places, just based off of my experiences here since July when we moved up here.

 

If you are looking for the younger/hip/trendy/ type of location I would recommend the downtown/uptown area. As you will discover with the Twin Cities real estate prices are insane. Why I'm not really sure, but they are in a word high!

 

If you are looking for the family, suburbia type feel there are quite a few nice areas. My recommendation would be if you have any idea where you might be working to post that city and we can go from there. I say this because the other crazy thing here is traffic. No sense in driving all the way across town every day if you don't have to, although I'm convinced 90% of the people who live here do just that. I personally like the southwest part of town, including Eden Prairie, Chanhassen, Chaska, Shakopee. All of these areas are nice, and houses are going up faster than you can say "wasn't there a field right here last summer?"

 

Good luck, holler with more questions!

[Using A Laptop Computer As A Gps]

I have a GPS unit I got off of Ebay for about 45 bucks, USB connection, I can't think of the brand, but it is a little smaller than a computer mouse, comined that with Microsoft's Streets and Trips 2005 and it iworks great. Nice big screen to look at. I actually got it to use for work since I have to get all over the Twin Cities. I put in an address and it draws a big green line for me to follow, easy to see with the quickest of glances.

Then shortly thereafter I got into caching, by using the swiss army knife program I can export Cache locations to Streets and Trips and they appear as pushpins all over the city! I can even customize those, I change them to Green pushpins when I find a cache, a red if I don't find it etc. Then I can see at a glance if I'm in a neighborhood with a cache I have not tried, or one I have not found yet. I still use a Garmin E-trex to hike in. But there are several virtual caches that I haven't had to break out the Garmin for.