Chris and I love camping and if you have ever run into us on the road or in the campground you’ll notice that while we do not have a TV in our camper we do bring dueling iPhones along on the journey. Part of our iPhone addiction is the nearly ubiquitous connectivity but more of our fascination with the iPhone is the unique applications that have become the toolkit for our travel adventures. This week, Chris and I will highlighting the iPhone apps we think go along best with our camping trips. These are the applications we have and use when we’re on the road.
Navigation – Getting there and finding stuff along the way…
For a number of years we have used a portable GPS in the car on road trips to map our travels and provide directions. The small portable unit helps us find the way through unfamiliar cities and keep us from making wrong turns – which is especially important when towing a camper (here’s a recent experience where making a wrong turn made for a bad experience). With a GPS unit built into the iPhone, applications can be location aware and provide very useful information based on the context of your location. This functionality is what makes the iPhone perfect for use on camping trips!
One of the first iPhone applications that we fell in love with is Where. Where is a geolocation sensitive application that delivers content to your mobile device about the world around you. In other words, as you drive down the highway Where figures out your location and tells you where to find the cheapest gas, near by highway traffic problems, and can help you find a good cup of coffee. I like Where because it can help me plan ahead for an exit off of the highway and it indexes gas prices for stations not always obvious from the highway. Sometimes pulling two or three blocks off the highway can save 20 cents per gallon and that’s what makes Where a great tool. Want to find the nearest KOA Kampground? Input into the search line at the top of Where and you will get a list of the KOA’s nearest to you. Where is not a camping specific application, but it does work well for when you’re on the road.
One of the things I have learned to appreciate towing a travel trailer, is the great American truck stop. Truck stops offer one thing that many gas stations do not have – wide lanes and open lots – that make maneuvering a travel trailer or RV a lot easier. Although there are many truck stops along Interstate highways in the US, they are less frequent on other highways and when you need one for a late night fuel up they can sometimes be difficult to find. This is where the Truck Stops application come in handy. In this clever app Leigh Gagnon has compiled a list of all truck stops, the amenities at each destination, and even the price of fuel at each stop. As an added feature, Truck Stops also can tell you the location of the next rest area and even near by Wal Marts. On our last trip to Indiana and New Jersey, we used this app all the time to plan our stops. The app costs $4.99, but frankly, we found it to be worth the price – especially considering a printed directory of truck stops would cost twice the price and would not deliver the same amount of functionality.
There are a couple of traffic apps available on the iPhone and the one that I find most useful is Traffic.com. Traffic.com does what other traffic apps on the iPhone do – they identify trouble spots like traffic accidents and construction. The advantage with Traffic.com is that the app integrates data from the Department of Transportation showing average highway speeds. Sure, a traffic app can show the location of highway construction, but what’s most important is how much is traffic slowing down and for how long. When driving across Arkansas on our most recent trip we ran into a long string of cars backed up on the highway, Traffic.com allowed us to quickly identify that lanes were closed ahead due to construction and showed us that we had about a 2 mile back up ahead of us. That kind of detail makes the process of deciding whether to stay on the highway or take a detour much easier. In our case, there were no available detours but we at least had the knowledge of what we had gotten into and about how long we would be delayed. Traffic.com is not specific to camping, but it is a great tool for all drivers.
What iPhone apps do you take camping with you? Leave a comment and tell us about your favorite!
