5 Useful Apps For Your Road Trip

Welcome to another Travel Tuesday! I feel like I’ve been talking about this road trip for ages now, so much so that it’s hard to believe I’m already almost 2 weeks in! I figured I’d put together the 5 useful apps for your next road trip (they were super helpful for planning out mine)!

For a little background info, between finishing up the last of residency, working on getting all my job stuff squared away, and preparing to move across the country again, packing/planning for this road trip kinda fell on the back burner. To date, I still have some loose ends to tie up, but it’s nice to have some flexibility!

What I can tell you is this:

• 13 states
• 22 national parks
• 7-8 national forests
• 8-9 national monuments
• 5-6 state parks

I have 4 friends joining me on sections of the trip, and will be staying at a collection of friend’s houses, hostels, Airbnb’s, hotels, and hammock camping my way across the country!

Roadtrippers

Roadtrippers has been instrumental in plotting my road trip path. Since I have the free version, I’m supposed to be limited to seven waypoints only, but I somehow managed to dump in 41 locations onto my map!

It’s not completely accurate to my road trip plans anymore because I kept adding even more destinations, but I do love how it lets you drag and drop your destinations to create the best/most streamlined route. It also lets you add dates and notes to your various destinations, and calculates how many miles you’ll need to drive, distance between locations, as well as likely cost of gas. There’s also guides and a handy search bar for you to find nearby attractions, gas, coffee, things to do, etc.

Truffl

(Updated as of 3/28/21.) This would technically make a total of 6 apps, but if you’d like to be able to put together ginormous itineraries for free, you might enjoy this app over Roadtrippers. You can plan and section off your itinerary however you want + browse others’ trips for inspiration. Feel free to find/add me on there (user name = fairyburger!)

I retroactively put my road trip in and this is what it looks like!

Sheets

I have type A tendencies, so I use this to draw up my itinerary. Planning make my world go round, and this is basically portable Excel. I mapped out most of the potential hikes I wanted to do here as well because it’s kinda nice to have everything in one place!

Waze

My favorite memory of this up was when Morgan Freeman was a GPS voice back in 2016. It made every journey an adventure! I’m super sad that he’s not anymore, but it’s still a really helpful app!

Waze gives you alerts on traffic, hazards, police, and also help you find the cheapest gas along the way, all while helping you to find the fastest route to your destination!

AllTrails

This is super helpful if you like to hike and want to find trails to explore for various different state parks, national parks, and the like. Probably not as helpful if you like to do backcountry hiking, but since this is mostly a solo trip, I will not be doing as much of that in the interest of safety! (I’ve heard Gaia is a good one for that though!)

AllTrails lets you search for trails by…

• Popularity
• Rating
• Distance
• Elevation
• Difficulty
• Things you want to see (e.g. wildlife, waterfalls)
• Things you want to do (e.g. birdwatch, mountain bike, rock climb)
• Suitability for kids/dogs, wheelchair/stroller accessible–you name it!

Trucker Path

As the name suggests this app is actually meant for truckers, but it does have some useful information for if your road tripping. You can customize it to show you where there are gas stations, rest stops (including # of available parking spots), and Walmarts (which typically let you stay overnight in their parking lot if you need to)!

• What’s the last road trip you went on?
• What apps have you found helpful for your road trip?

If you’d like to follow along with me in real time, check out my Instagram + facebook! I also started a road trip tag if you’re interested in reading about all my adventures in more detail but not so much in real time! :P