Looking for a good GPS - Touring, no off road. Considering Garmin Zumo XT - thoughts?

[racoon]

So I tried to plot the route I am taking to my sister's house for Thanksgiving, and Google Maps gave me lots of problems.

<<<snip>>>

And the route I plotted on my computer included drag and drop changes to avoid the downtown areas of Nashville TN, Memphis TN, and Dallas TX.

<<<snip>>>

So I'm frustrated and confused, as I know I've used Google Maps before.
Time for more research...

So a bit more time with Google trying to figure this out and I found out that it's working exactly as Google designed it to work.
It is basically (re)plotting the route using what it knows about current road conditions at the time the route is being plotted.

Which could be entirely different tomorrow or even in an hour from now, based on real time road conditions according to Google.

And of course there's a workaround... which requires more work.

And this comment from @jcthorne is the answer:

Try it again with a longer distance, and multiple stops like gas stops and lunch along the way and ending up at a hotel.

So every time I want the route to vary from a "default" route, I need to add a stop so that it won't calculate a different route.

Another term used is to add a waypoint.

And yeah, that's going to take some time...

 

[CO Rider]

I have fought the route planning battle with several different Route Planners and GPS devices on multiple different motorcycle brands.
They all are finicky and time consuming, I found I spent more time trying to reconcile where I am with the planned route than enjoying the ride.
The last two touring seasons, about 19000 miles, we came up on a solution that works for us.
Each day starts with a hand written list of the roads we intend to ride that day. If we deviate from the list because a stop or different route presents itself, we don't care. We do what we want without concerning ourselves with a route.
Some time during the day, we figure out where we want to stop that night and plug in an address to our phone or the bike's GPS if it has one. We then go on our merry way and enjoy the ride. We don't concern ourselves with the routing since just putting in an ending address, the mapping software will recalculate the route as we go. Eventually we follow the route on the unit to find the hotel, or attraction.
I'm all for tech that enhances my life, but sometimes the tech was never really designed for how we wish it worked.
Next year will be our first touring season on the Spyder. I use an Android phone and we plan on using it just as I described above. I considered buying an XT2. But so far I just plug in an ending address on my phone, stick it back in my pocket and pick up the turn by turn audio on my Cardo com when I'm ready to head to the address. I might spring for a handlebar mount at some point, but that's way less expensive than a $700 GPS that does exactly the same thing as the phone I already own.
Works for us, YMMV.