An eight-day trip to California, where my husband and I would fly to San Francisco, tour the city, head to Yosemite, then back to the coast, driving south to Los Angeles, would require a plan. Carefully selecting the cities that most interested us, we opted not to restrict ourselves to a time schedule. We had to be at LAX by a certain date in order to catch our flight home, but how far we traveled each day was left open-ended. How could I create a document for such a journey?
There had to be an app or a website that would assist me. I looked at several, including one by AAA, but chose Wanderlog instead. Wanderlog is a free travel planning app that helps you research, organize, and map out trips by creating detailed itineraries.
Although I didn’t use these particular features, Wanderlog can combine schedules, reservation management, budget tracking, and maps. It is available via both an app and website. You can also share your itinerary with friends and family.
Loading in all our destination points, along with the specific things we wanted to do and see in each location, Wanderlog showed me the miles between each stop, enabling me to build a tentative, thorough outline by day, best as I could estimate. It suggested things for us to do in the areas I had included in our route. Once we were in California, Wanderlog made it easy to move a location to another day, so I could adjust the daily breakdown depending on where we ended up each evening.
A few months later, we were going to Washington, DC for a long weekend. We had a dozen obscure attractions we wanted to go to within the city, but we had no idea the most efficient order in which to visit them. No problem. This time, I entered in the twelve addresses, then clicked on “Optimize Route.” Wanderlog asked me to provide my starting point and where I wanted to end up, then reorganizined all the locations into the most streamlined approach.
In this day and age, for years now, I should have known there would be be a tool that would make trip planning easier. Though neither Mister Rain nor I mind getting a little lost sometimes when we are on an excursion, we also like to make the absolute most of the limited time we have. Wanderlog keeps us on the straight and narrow but it also adapts when we decide to follow the crooked paths as well.
Sister Rain’s Note:
I did not receive compensation of any kind from Wanderlog for this story. I am just happy to share a terrific travel tool.
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