How to enter a long flight plan into your GPS...

In two words, don't bother.

Flew today Anacortes (north of Seattle) back home to Palo Alto,
IFR at FL190. The flight plan was pretty complicated, over a dozen
waypoints all carefully entered into my shiny new 530 during climb out.
And guess what... I got to fly to exactly one of them. Initially I was
vectored, then given direct to one of them, then I asked direct for
the last one in Seattle's airspace, and they gave me direct Palo Alto.
Very nice of them, and I did appreciate it. But it made all that
twiddling pretty pointless. Oakland, when they got hold of me,
soon gave me a different routing - but easy, Point Reyes and the
PYE1 approach to PAO.

Next time, I don't think I'll bother!

(Norcal however was a different story. Has ANYBODY been handled
by Norcal lately without being forgotten about? They failed to give me
a handover, then of course when I finally queried it and they DID hand
me over, to an irate controller on another sector who wanted to know
where I'd been and why I'd ignored his traffic calls. Sigh.)

John