“Lacey’s Mom is driving us to the Presidents Day volleyball tournament in Minneapolis,” Bonnie was telling me as I watched TV.

“That’s cool,” I said, thankful I didn’t have to be the lone male on another Mall of America shopping adventure.

As I watched TV, my wife was telling me something about tournaments in Springfield, Mo., and Indianapolis.

Huh? What? Did she say I was driving to both? I started paying more attention.

“What’s after that?”

“If we qualify for nationals, we’re going to Atlanta,” Bonnie said.

Suddenly, this weekend volleyball league thing was taking on a life of its own. It was time to do a little trip planning.

Building the itinerary

“MapQuest.com,” Katy told me.

That’s the Web site my oldest daughter uses when she and her Kansas University friends head off for weekend road trips to visit friends at other universities.

MapQuest has been around since the 1960s, founded by R.R. Donnelley & Sons, which provided all the free road maps that used to be available at gasoline stations. The company launched its Web site in 1996, which was the first consumer interactive mapping site. Last July, Media Metrix named MapQuest.com as the No. 1 online mapping site.

One in four Internet users accesses MapQuest each month, getting more than 400 million maps and 60 million sets of driving directions. Ninety percent print out the maps and take them along for the trip, according to the company.

It’s pretty easy to use. You type in your starting point and your destination point and it creates a map and driving directions you can print out.

MapQuest also is available on wireless devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs that have Web access. For example, Sprint PCS and AT&T Wireless subscribers can access it through AOL Mobile. Nextel users also can access it while in Web mode.

But you’ll probably want to pull over while driving to access a map.

It takes a while to punch in the starting address and the ending address on a mobile phone. But the directions are useful — especially if you’re like me and don’t want to stop to ask someone.

MapQuest also lets you easily find restaurants, motels, gas stations, ATMs and retailers when you get into a city. If you use a Web-enabled PDA, you can get a map on the small screen. Best advice — let your passenger be your navigator.

Where to stop

Another Web site that looks pretty useful is www.freetrip.com. On it, you type in your starting point and your destination. Then you fill out a form that asks you a lot of personal preference questions about the road you want to take or the places you want to stay.

For example, do you favor scenic roads or do you want to avoid tolls?

It also asks you your lodging preferences, such as economy hotel, mid-priced hotels, upscale hotels, a campground, condos or bed and breakfast inns.

It then provides you with driving directions that include the names of the hotels and motels along the way, with links to each of those hotels and information on how to make reservations online.

The Alexandria, Va.,-based Web site also offers more services to those who become members of its InsideTrackClub.com for $19.95 a year. In that, you get more detail about points of interest along your route, average gasoline prices along the route, emergency numbers for police, speed limits of the state you’re entering and weather conditions.

Other Web sites that offer trip planning and customized maps include RandMcNally.com, AAA Auto Club (www.csaa.com), NationwideAutoClub.com and BetterWorldClub.com, which all charge fees for their services.

Ready to roll

I checked out the maps and saw it was going to take me 4 hours and 56 minutes to drive the 212 miles to our tournament in Springfield.

I also found it was going to take 8 hours and 30 minutes to drive the 518 miles to Indianapolis.

And there was some good news, according to MapQuest — I could stop for Krispy Kreme doughnuts in Independence and in St. Louis along the way.

Sometime between now and that trip I’m also going to have to find out some fun things to do in Indianapolis between games — besides shopping.

But with my luck, Bonnie is going to find out about Indianapolis’ Castleton Square Mall, the biggest mall in Indiana.