For me, Trip planner was a welcome addition. I still prefer to create all routes as a single day routes outside of trip planner. However, it is very easy to add routes to trip planner and once entered, you can expand your map and drag the pointer alone and the closest city will appear below with additional information. In addition, you can search alone you route near the city. Here is the steps to get you routes into Trip planner
1. Create routes form waypoints in a new TripPlanner Trip
2. Create a trip of X days using an arbitrary start and end point, and then delete the points leaving a totally empty trip of X day duration. Answer no to the popup question will give less points to delete.
3. Exit TripPlanner and drag the routes form the list to the dates associated with the trip. The dates appear under the trip on the left under On My Computer
In my opinion Trip Planner is the best way to study the details of a route you created.