How to use the Travel Planner

Getting started

A trip needs two things: a name and somewhere to go.

1. Press + New in the trip list, give the trip a name and, if you like, its dates, and press Start planning. (The From and To dates also sit in the banner along the top, where they can be changed any time; picking a start date fills in a finish two days later.)
2. The app asks Where does it start? — Start from Home puts your Home in as stop 1, wearing the Home Base pin, or Pick the starting place myself leaves the map to you. No Home yet? The box to set one is right there in the question. (See Your Home.)
3. Tap the map where you want to go. A stop appears, named after the place it landed on. Would rather type? Under the stops list, Type in your stops takes a whole list of addresses and places at once.
4. Tap again somewhere else. The road between them is worked out and drawn, with the miles and driving time on the button along the top.

That is a working trip. Everything after this is optional — and much of it does not even need a trip (see Without a trip).

Your account

Without an account everything works, but your trips live in the browser you made them in — they will not appear on your phone.

The person button at the top right creates an account with an email and a password. Signed in, your trips save to your account within a few seconds of any change, and turn up on any device you sign into. Delete a trip on one device and it disappears from the others too; hide one and it is hidden on the others too. Signing in also offers to set your Home, and your Home, your ❤ Favorites, your red states, your hidden-trips list and the things you drop with no trip open all follow the account the same way.

Trips

The left-hand column lists your trips. Click one to open it; click it again to close it. + New makes a fresh one — name it, press Start planning, and it asks whether to start from your Home or pick the starting place yourself.

The trips area works like a desktop. Drag a card and drop it on another card — the above/below line lights up — and it slots into the stack there. Drop it on empty space instead and it parks exactly where you let go, and stays there (parking spots are remembered on that device). The ▴▾ arrows on each card move it through the stack too, and bring a parked card back in. There are no space limits: the area grows to hold whatever you park and whatever you unfold, and one scrollbar reaches all of it.

The planner always starts on a clean map. No trip opens by itself — not even the top one. A trip comes on only when you tap its card, and when you tap it again it goes off and stays off until you tap it once more. Arrange the stack however suits you; the order never decides what opens.

The 🔒 padlock on a card freezes that trip's map: pins cannot be dragged, roads cannot be pulled, and tapping or long-pressing the map adds nothing and asks nothing — so panning and zooming around a finished plan can never rearrange it. The stop pages, the stops list and the deliberate "tap the map" flows (placing a treasure, a capsule, a sub-stop) all still work. Tap the padlock again to unlock.

Every trip card has its own Stops arrow, not just the open one. Click any card's arrow and its stops unfold directly under that card — the trip you are in shows its full stop cards, any other trip shows a compact list (tap a stop to centre the map on it) — with as many trips open at once as you like, accordion fashion. Stop cards themselves stay slim: number, name, the ✓ to tick a stop reached, the ≡ door into the stop's own page, and the ✕ to remove it; everything else lives inside the page.

The 👁 eye on a trip card opens that trip alongside the one you are in. Two things happen: its route joins the map as a faded dashed line with little dots, and its stops join the bottom of the stops list in their own labelled section — so opening the stops drawer shows every stop from both trips at once. Tap a guest stop to centre the map on it; tap the section's name bar to switch into that trip and edit them. Press the eye again to put it away. The faded route draws as straight lines between stops, not the driven road — context, not navigation — and the open trip keeps its full colour.

• ✕ on the card asks: hide it, or delete it? Hiding keeps everything — the trip stays on your account and your phone, unlocked, and anyone planning it with you keeps it too — it simply has no card until you show it again. Finished trips can live there forever. A 🗄 Hidden trips button appears at the bottom of the list while anything is hidden: open it, tap a trip (or its 👁) to show it again, or ✕ to delete it for good. Deleting ends the sharing and the unlock goes with it; the undo arrow brings a deleted trip straight back during the same sitting.
• 🔔 on the card opens that trip's reminders, with a badge when something is due.
• Import loads a trip file — one you exported, or one someone sent you. A trip of your own comes back as itself (its unlock and its planning-together invitations return with it); it is a copy only while the original is still in your list.
• Export — right beside Import, above the trip list — opens a Save box for the open trip. Pick your Saved Trips folder the first time and the box opens right there every time after. The file is a safe copy you can keep or send to whoever is travelling with you.

Removing several stops at once

The bin button with the tool buttons opens Tidy up the stops: every stop listed with a tick box, showing what each one holds. Tick whatever you want gone and remove them together. Bend points in the route are listed separately at the bottom. The undo arrow brings everything back.

Without a trip

Nearly everything works on the clean map, with no trip open at all.

Tap the map and the What should this spot be? box opens just the same. Just a marker, ❤ Add to Favorites, Hide a treasure and Seal a time capsule all work with nothing open: the marker, the treasure and the capsule go into a bag of their own that belongs to no trip. They stay on the map when a trip comes on, they are still there when it goes off, and they follow your account to your other devices, the way Favorites do. Car games, Treasure hunt, Time capsules and Voice memories in the Fun stuff menu open the same bag: a plate spotted on the drive home with no trip open counts all the same. The You-are-here box on the location dot works too — a favorite or a marker right where you stand. A loose marker's menu grows it into a stop of whatever trip is open at the time.

A few things are the trip, and cannot happen without one: a stop, a Photo Stop, a sub-stop, the route, typing in stops, checklists, budget, reminders, the calendar, printing, playing and sharing the trip. Ask for one of those on the clean map and a little box says This needs a trip, with a + Start a new trip button right there and a Not now — nothing is lost, and the marker you were holding stays where it is.

The tool buttons, one by one

The blue tiles under the trip list — every one a picture now.

Press and hold any of them for half a second and the app says what it does without doing it. A tool that is busy (its panel open, the rain showing) sits on a green tile; the slim ▾ bar above them folds the whole row away and brings it back. In the order they sit:

	Trips & stops (phones only)	Opens the trip list and the stops drawer, with the number of stops in its corner.
	Checklists	Lists you name yourself — packing, errands, anything — ticked off as you go. Needs a trip.
	Budget	Gas, lodging, restaurants and everything else, each with a total, plus the grand total. Needs a trip.
	Reminders	Nudges before you go, handed to your phone's own calendar so they ring. Needs a trip.
	Written directions	Turn-by-turn for every leg, in plain writing; they print with the trip. Needs a trip.
	GPS	The dot where you are. Red target = off, green = on. No trip needed; tap the little car for the You-are-here box.
	Rain radar	Live rain over the whole map; stays lit while showing. Press again to turn it off.
	Cool places	Pins the notable places wherever you are looking — parks, beaches, museums, the odd and storied — plus what other travelers shared.
	Roadside oddities	Hundreds of the things America builds by the highway. Lit while the pins show; zoom in to a state or so.
	Fun stuff	The menu of playful things: audiobooks & podcasts, ghost towns, Golden Corral, both helmets, States I've Been To, treasure hunt, time capsules, car games, voice memories. No trip needed.
	Favorites	Your ❤ list of places for another trip, each with its pin. Tied to your account, not to a trip.
	Save every photo	Saves every picture from every stop of the open trip, each carrying the place it was taken.
	Tidy up the stops	Tick several stops and remove them in one go. Needs a trip.
	Tidy the map	The broom: sweeps search results, nearby pins, flags, radar, temperatures and every temporary guest off the map. Your stops are never touched.
	Worth a look	Notable places along your route or on the screen, from TomTom's records and Wikipedia. Needs a trip.
	Play the trip	Runs the route like a little film, pausing at each stop for its photos. Needs a trip.
	Print or save as PDF	The whole trip on paper, the storybook, or a PDF. Needs a trip.
	Share	With a trip: a read-only page of it, live driving, planning together, meeting up. With no trip: a link to watch your GPS dot.

The map's own left edge keeps just two: the rain cloud (the radar again, right where you are looking) and the thermometer (today's temperatures laid over the map as numbers). Up in the header sit the 🧭 Directions compass, the ⚙ Settings wheel with your Home in it, and the ? quick tour — all on a light blue so they stand out against the sunset. Under the header runs one bar: the Route menu (round trip / one way, tolls, old roads — see Changing the route), undo and redo, the From and To dates with the 📅 calendar, and the search box.

Road mode — the phone face for the drive itself

Plan on the computer. Drive on the phone.

Press 🚗 Road up top (just after the compass) and the planning furniture folds away: no trip list, no tool tray, no dates, no undo arrows, no route options, no search box. What is left is the map with your route, your stops and your car, the driving strip (next stop, when you get there, miles left), and five big buttons along the bottom:

	STOPS	Your stops, next one first, with what time you get to each. ✓ ticks one off (tap again to untick), ≡ opens its page, tapping the row flies the map there. With no trip open it lists your trips instead — tap one to drive it.
GO	GO	The big green button: LEAVING NOW starts the trip, then it is red PAUSE TRIP and green RESUME TRIP — the same engine as the button in the stops list. Greyed until the road is drawn; UNLOCK on a free trip.
	CAMERA	Opens the camera and drops a slim red Photo Stop right where you stand (the location dot has to be on).
	FUN	The Fun stuff menu — car games, treasure hunt, time capsules, voice memories, the states map, Golden Corral, the oddities.
⋯	MORE	Audiobooks & podcasts, the location dot, rain radar, temperatures, Watch us drive, the meetup group's routes and convoy, written directions, the broom, another trip — and Back to Plan mode.

The map is frozen the way the padlock freezes it: a tap on bare map adds nothing (a car bouncing along must not plant stops), the road cannot be pulled and the pins cannot be dragged. Pins still open when you tap them, the 🧭 Directions compass, the turn banner, the voice and the ⛶ driving view all work as always, and adding on the road is done on purpose — from the You-are-here box (tap the car), the STOPS sheet's Add where I am as a stop, or a treasure's Pick the spot on the map. The ⭐ cool places layer is switched off on the way in, because it is the one thing that keeps fetching as the map moves.

Your phone remembers. Switch to Road mode once and the phone opens that way every time until you press 🗺 Plan; the computer stays in Plan mode. Same trips, same account — a trip planned on the computer is on the phone the moment it syncs, and a stop ticked off in the car is ticked off at home.

Audiobooks, podcasts and Audible

Something to listen to, without leaving the drive.

Open Audiobooks & podcasts — the first row of the Fun stuff menu, and the first row of MORE in Road mode. Whatever is playing sits on a slim strip just above the road bar (along the bottom of the map in Plan mode): the name, ↺30, ▶︎/⏸, ↻30 and the speed (tap it to cycle 0.8× to 2×). Tap the name for the full sheet. It keeps playing with the screen off, the lock screen and the car's steering-wheel buttons work it, and — the part no other app can do for the planner — it ducks under the turn-by-turn voice: the book drops to a murmur while a turn is spoken and comes back up after.

Your books

Audiobook files you own: MP3, M4A or M4B — the DRM-free kind from Libro.fm, Chirp, LibriVox, or CDs you ripped. Press ＋ Load a book and pick the file, or all of a book's chapter files at once; they are copied into the planner's own storage, so the book plays next time without asking. A book made of chapter files runs them in order and moves on by itself; the sheet lists the parts to jump between. It remembers where you were in every book. ✎ renames one, ✕ removes it from the planner (the file on your phone is untouched). A sleep timer (15, 30, 45 minutes or an hour) pauses it for you.

Podcasts

Type a show's RSS feed link, an Apple Podcasts link, or just its name, and press Find. A name brings a short list to pick from; a link adds the show straight away. Tap a show for its newest episodes — date, length, and how far into one you got — and tap an episode to play it. Episodes stream from the show's own site, so they need a signal; ↻ on the show's page looks for new ones, and ✕ removes the show. A finished episode is ticked.

Audible

Audible's books play only inside Audible's own app — no outside app is allowed in, and the planner is no exception. So it is a hand-off: Open Audible jumps to the app at your library; come back with the app switcher and Audible keeps playing behind the planner, driven by the car's own controls. The phone decides how Audible and the planner's voice mix (usually both play; the planner cannot duck Audible from outside).

The listening plan

Works for any book — Audible's included. Type what you are listening to and how much is left (hours and minutes), press Save the plan, and the trip does the sums against the driving still ahead: 🎧 The Martian · 6 h 20 m left · you'll finish it about 8 mi before Amarillo, Thu ~2:15 PM — or outlasts the drive by 1 h 40 m. It rides the road bar in Road mode, follows the live times once you are driving, and the storybook remembers what you listened to. With one of your own books playing, Use the book that's playing reads what is left straight from the player.

My states map

The sticker map from the back of the RV, kept by the app.

Open Fun stuff on the tool row and press 🗺 States I've Been To: the planning map steps aside for a plain map of the United States — every state drawn in, and every state you have set foot in filled red. A bar across the top carries your count; its red ✕ Close brings your roads, stops and routes back exactly where you left them.

• States color themselves. Any state where a trip stop lands turns red on its own — your existing trips count the moment you first open the map.
• Tap to add the past. Been to Maine long before this app existed? Tap it on the states map and it fills in. Tap a red state to take it back — the app will not argue with your memory.
• It is yours for life, not the trip's. The red states stay no matter which trip is open, and keep growing as long as you keep driving. All fifty earns a celebration worth the miles.

The state lines live inside the app itself, so the map works with no signal at all — the back of beyond included.

Adding stops

Several ways, all of which name themselves from the nearest town:

• Tap the map. Your first two stops drop straight in — while you are building, every tap is obviously a stop. Once the road is drawn, a tap asks first — a question mark appears with the choices, each with its own little picture: make it a stop, add it to Favorites (straight onto your ❤ Favorites list, named after what is there, nothing added to this trip), take a photo, hide a treasure, seal a time capsule, just a marker, or a sub-stop — so a stray tap can never tangle a finished plan. Press the cross and nothing is added. (With no trip open the same box opens — see Without a trip.) The bottom of that question box shows the spot's coordinates the way Google Maps writes them (35.222623, -97.439478) with a Copy button — no right-click, no menus; tap Copy and paste them into a text, a search box, anywhere. Drag the ? pin and the numbers follow it. The same 📍 coordinates line with Copy sits at the top of the What kind of marker? box a new marker opens with, on a marker's menu, a stop's page (under the "Stop 3 of 12" line), a sub-stop's dot box, and the route line's ? pin box (following that pin as you drag it too).
• Search above the map for a town, landmark or address. The best match lands as a 📌 marker — not a stop yet, so searching around never rearranges your route. Tap the marker and choose: make it a stop, add it to a Mini-Trip, add it to ❤ Favorites, or throw it away. It keeps the name and address the search found, and you can drag it if the spot is a little off.
• Paste coordinates into the same search box — collected from Google Maps, a GPS unit, a geocaching page, anywhere. Both kinds work: the decimal pair a right-click in Google Maps copies (35.222623, -97.439478) and the degree-minute-second line from a place card (35°13'21.4"N 97°26'22.1"W). A 📌 marker lands on the exact spot; grow it into a stop and the app looks up the name of what is actually there.
• Your marker legend. The moment any marker drops — from a search, pasted coordinates, a map tap's 📌 Just a marker, or the same button on any place popup — the app asks What kind of marker? Pick one of your categories, choose Plain marker, or press ＋ New category and make one on the spot: a name ("Gas", "Photo spot", "Maybe hotel"), a line about what it means to you, a pin graphic from the gallery, and which group it belongs in. Forty-six pictured pins come ready-made as categories, sorted into six groups: Nature & Scenery (View Points, Cave, Rock Formation, Rock Formation & Cave, Natural Bridges, Canyons, Springs, Waterfalls, Scenic Drive, Botanical Gardens, Crystal/Diamond Mines), History & Heritage (Statue, Monument, Old House, Ruins, Ghost Towns, Cemeteries, Mills, Farms, Bridge, Battlefields), Museums & Parks (Museum, Military Museum, Car Museum, Motorcycle Museum, Dinosaur Park), Odd & Fun (World's Largest, Roadside Sculpture, Attraction, Haunted Houses, U.F.O. Sighting, Movie Filming Location), Outdoor Activities (Trail Head, Recreation Area, Camp Site, RV Site, Biking, ATV Riding) and Stay, Eat & Home (Hotel, Motels, Cabins, Lodge, Restaurant, Shopping, Home Base, Family Visit) — plus plain coloured teardrops for kinds with no picture, which land under Everything else. The What kind of marker? list shows the groups as headings and flows sideways into columns — two on a phone, four or five on a computer — filled to equal height, so a longer legend means more rows, never a wider box; rest on an entry (or hold it on a phone) to read your description of it. Every category can be renamed, described, re-pinned, moved to another group or deleted, and a category you delete stays deleted (new pins added in a later update still arrive as new categories). The marker wears its pin on the map from then on, the same size as a stop pin. There is no legend box cluttering the map — tap a marker and everything about it is right there: its category and pin, its 📍 coordinates with a Copy button, your words about the category, its name box, and a notes box for this one spot. Change re-files it; ✎ Edit the legend renames a category, gives it a different pin, moves it to another group, or deletes it (whatever wore it goes back to its plain pin — nothing is removed). Your legend is kept on this device and is the same for every trip; a trip opened on another phone brings its categories along with it.
• Stops and sub-stops wear the legend too. Open a stop's page (tap its pin, or the three-line button on its card) and a pin card sits just under the position line and the stop's 📍 coordinates: Pick one and the numbered badge becomes the category's picture, with the stop's number on a little disc in the trip's colour — the moon still marks an overnight, and a stop you have passed still fades. In a Mini-Trip, every sub-stop row has a 🏷 button that does the same for its gold dot, a size smaller — or tap the dot itself on the map and a small box opens with its 📍 coordinates and a box for its name (type one, press Enter, and the row under the stop card, the dot's hover label and the box's title all follow), for its pin, and for sharing it with all travelers (moving, splitting, weather and removing stay on the row). A marker that grows into a stop or a sub-stop keeps its category. The tiny pictures also ride the stop list, the All Stops panel and the sub-stop rows, so the list reads like the map. Stops and sub-stops are not asked when they are made — the picture is yours to add when you want it. Changing what a pin wears changes only the picture: the stop order, the road and any bends you dragged into it stay exactly as they were.
• Type them in. Under the stops list, Type in your stops takes a whole list at once — an address, a business or a town per line, looked up and added in order. See Typing the stops in.
• Start from Home. Every new trip offers your Home as stop 1, and a trip that started elsewhere has Put Home in as stop 1 under its stops. See Your Home.
• Tap the little car — with the location button on, tap the car and choose "make it a stop" to add wherever you actually are.
• Drag or tap the road and choose "make it a stop" (see below).

Deleting a stretch of road: right-click it, or tap it and choose Delete this segment. If you dragged bends onto that stretch, you can throw them away and let the normal road redraw; and since the line between two stops only leaves when a stop does, the panel also offers to remove either stop — with undo standing by if you change your mind.

New stops usually go on the end. If one clearly belongs between two stops you already have, it slots in there instead and tells you so — and the undo arrow puts it back on the end if you disagree.

Renaming a stop: tap its name in the list and type straight over it. The old name is already selected, so the first thing you type replaces it. Enter keeps the new name, Escape puts the old one back, and tapping away keeps it too. The same tap works in the All Stops panel. A name you type yourself is yours for good — the place lookup that turns “Little Rock” into “Rock Town Distillery” will never overwrite it. Rename is also still in the three-line button on the card if you prefer it there.

Tapping anywhere else on the card centres the map on that stop, and the card is dragged by the ⋮⋮ grip on its left to change the order.

A closer look at a pin: on a computer, rest the mouse on one of your pins — a numbered stop, a photo stop, a Mini-Trip dot, or a 📌 marker — and after about a second it grows to three times its size, so a crowded stretch of map reads at a glance; move the mouse away and it shrinks straight back. Each pin grows from its own point, so the spot it marks never moves. The pins the app lays down for you — cool places, stadiums, ghost towns, roadside oddities, nearby finds — stay their normal size, so the ones you put there stand out. Phones have no hover, so this is a mouse-only trick. The pin's little label keeps out of the way too: with a mouse it follows the pointer and sits just below it, so the grown pin is never hidden behind its own name (on a phone the label stays above the pin, where a thumb does not cover it).

Your Home, and typing the stops in

🏠 Home

The ⚙ wheel up top, just left of the ?, holds your Home — the place most of your trips start from. Type the address (or a place name), press Find and press the match; or Tap it on the map (the box closes, your next tap is Home); or press Use where I am right now. Set it once. When you sign in the app offers to set it, and a Home follows you to your other devices.

Every + New trip asks Where does it start? — Start from Home puts Home in as stop 1 (wearing the Home Base pin), or Pick the starting place myself leaves the trip empty for you to tap the map. No Home yet? The Home box sits right there in the question, so you can set it and start from it in one go. Change or clear Home from the wheel any time; trips already made keep the stop they have. Planning a trip that started somewhere else? Put Home in as stop 1 sits under its stops. The Home stop always wears the Home Base pin.

⌨ Typing the stops in

Rather than tapping the map, type them: under the stops list press Type in your stops (a trip with stops shows Type in more stops). One place per line — a street address, a business, a town, even pasted coordinates. Press FIND them; under each line the app shows what it found, in green, or says Not found — add the town and state. Check the matches, retype any that missed, then ADD these stops and they land on the trip in that order, after any stops already there. A brand-new trip with a Home set starts the list with Stop 1 — Home, ticked; untick it to type stop 1 yourself. Nothing is added until you press ADD.

❤ Favorites — places for another trip

Sometimes you find somewhere wonderful that this trip simply won’t go near. Press ❤ Add to Favorites on its little card — it’s on search results, the ⭐ cool places, 👻 ghost towns, 🛣 roadside oddities, 🍽 Golden Corral and stadium cards, on any 📌 marker’s menu, on every stop’s page and sub-stop’s box, in the question box when you tap the map or the road, and in the You-are-here box (those name the spot for you) — and the place lands on your Favorites list with its name, its coordinates and its pin: a bare spot asks which pin drop it wears, and a marker or stop hands its own pin along. It is tied to your account, not to any trip: nothing is added, moved or changed on the trip you have open.

The ❤ Favorites tool button (the heart on the tool row) opens the list. From there you can:

• See each place’s pin at the left of its row — tap it to pick another from your legend. Show flies the map to the place.
• Make a NEW trip — tick the places you fancy and press Make a NEW trip from the checked. A fresh trip appears with those places as its stops, named whatever you type. The Favorites list keeps everything — making a trip never empties it.
• Add the checked to the OPEN trip — same idea, but the ticked places drop into the trip you already have open, each slotting into its sensible spot on the route.

When a favorite joins a trip — either way — the stop wears the favorite’s pin.

Playing without risking the real trip: save the real trip to a file first — the Export button beside Import, above the trip list, opens a Save box (which remembers your Saved Trips folder after the first save). Then experiment as hard as you like, even delete the trip, and when you want it back press Import above the trip list and pick the file. It comes back whole — stops, route shaping, notes, photos, budget, the lot — and it comes back as the same trip: its unlock and its planning-together invitations return with it, so nobody needs a new link. (Import the file while the original is still in your list and you get a copy instead.) Hiding a trip — the ✕ on its card — is the gentler way to get one out of the list without any of that.

Changing the route

The Route menu — the button at the left of the bar under the header, reading Round trip or One way — holds the four route choices: Round trip (the drive home drawn and counted), One way, Skip tolls, and 🛤 Take the old roads. Change one and the road redraws; the menu stays open until you tap elsewhere, and the button shows what is set (One way · no tolls · old roads). Undo and redo, the From and To dates, the 📅 calendar and the search box share that one bar, so the map has the room.

Three different things can be dragged, and they do three different jobs.

On a phone: the three finger moves

Dragging the road

Press on the drawn route and pull it to the road you would rather take. Pause for a beat while dragging and the road you would get sketches itself in as a dashed line, so you can see the new drive before committing. Let go and the drive re-routes through your hand immediately — no questions, no flag, nothing on the map: the route stays one unbroken coloured line between your stops, and the mileage folds together as if nothing happened. A drag re-routes the WHOLE stretch between the two stops either side — anything you had shaped on that stretch before is cleared out at the same moment, so nothing invisible pulls the road back through where it used to run. One drag, one clean road. The spot you drop snaps onto the road itself, so the route never grows a little out-and-back spur to touch it. The undo arrow puts everything back exactly as it was, and a right-click on the stretch (or tap → Delete this segment) throws its shaping away without re-routing. Tapping a stretch also offers Straighten the WHOLE trip — every stretch back to the app's own road in one go, undo-able. And housekeeping happens by itself: deleting a stop clears the shaping on both neighbouring stretches with it.

Tap the route line (rather than dragging it) when you want the choices:

• Re-route — the phone's version of dragging the road. Press it and the panel steps aside; drag the marker onto the road you want — pause and the road you would get sketches itself in — then let go, and the whole stretch between those two stops redraws through it. Tap anywhere on the open map to cancel instead.
• Back to the app's own road — forgets every change on that stretch and lets the app pick the route again.
• Make it a stop — a proper numbered stop with everything a stop has.
• Delete this segment — throw away the bends here, or remove a stop at either end.
• 📷 Take a photo — opens the camera and leaves a slim red Photo Stop there, with the picture already in it. Photos are the only thing that put a pin on the route line.

Behind the curtain (you never have to think about this): the spot you drag to is remembered as an invisible marker called a bend point, and the route is required to pass through it. Each stretch between two stops keeps only the bend from its latest drag — dragging again replaces the shaping, it never piles up.

The map moves with you. The spot you want may sit just off the screen. While dragging a road or a pin, ease toward the edge of the map and the map starts to creep along in that direction — slowly near the rim, a little quicker right at it — carrying what you are dragging with it. Pull back toward the middle and it stops. No need to let go, zoom out and start over.

Right-clicking a stretch still offers Back to the app's own road, which clears the stretch's shaping and lets the app pick the route again.

In the tap panel nothing is decided until you choose. You can drag its marker about first, and the box itself can be moved by its blue top if it is in the way.

When a route looks wrong

Routes are always worked out the quickest way, which will happily add a few miles to stay on faster roads. If one wanders oddly, open the miles and time button — it warns you when Skip tolls or Take the old roads is switched on in the Route menu, which is the usual reason.

If the whole route falls back to straight lines, one of your pins has probably landed somewhere with no road — out in a lake, or across water. Drag that pin onto land, or delete it, and the roads come back. The miles and time button says exactly what went wrong.

Roads are remembered while the app is open

Once a route has been worked out, the planner keeps it for as long as the app stays open. Switch a trip's card off and on, press LEAVING NOW, change miles to kilometres — the same road comes straight back without asking the map service again. Only a real change to the route asks afresh: a stop added, moved or removed, a bend, or a route option such as round trip, skip tolls or the old roads. Close the app and the roads are forgotten; the map service's rules do not allow them to be stored on your device.

Times and driving days

Planned with typed times; corrected by the clock the moment you drive.

Stay times while planning

The first stop gets a proper leaving time and date — that is the trip's start, and it stays put (the green button's real clock beats it once you drive).

Every stop after just says how long. Its page carries a Stay time box: type 45m, 1:30 or 2h and the math does the rest — every arrival downstream counts from it, and inserting a new stop earlier in the day simply bumps everything along, nothing to fix. Leave it empty and the drive rolls straight on.

Type AN for all night: you roll out next morning at 8:00, and a little time box appears so you can make that 9:30 or 6:45 — change it and every stop after bumps along. Staying longer? 2N means two nights, 3N three, and so on — the calendar skips ahead and you roll out at your hour on the morning after the last night. (A night is at least a night: arrive at 6 in the morning and AN means the following morning, not two hours later.)

Each stop's page shows when the plan says you arrive — date and all — and the stop cards' arrival lines carry the day and the stay: arrive 9:15 AM, Thu Sep 4 · stay 2 hr or · overnight.

And overnight stops wear the moon so your home bases stand out at a glance: the stop's map pin carries a small night-blue badge on its corner — 🌙 for one night, 2N or 3N for longer — and a 🌙 sits beside the name in the stops list and the All Stops panel. Pass-through stops stay plain.

And the whole plan fits on a calendar: the 📅 button beside the trip dates opens a month view drawn the way a real calendar draws things — a green ribbon runs edge to edge through every day of the trip, straight from your From and To dates, with the trip's name at the start of each week, and every stop sits as a coloured chip on the day the plan says you arrive — overnights marked AN or 2N, the drive home on its own day. Nothing on it is typed or dragged: change a stay or add a stop and the calendar re-deals every card onto its new day. Tap a chip to see that spot on the map. On a computer, drag the panel's bottom-right corner and the calendar zooms as one picture — every word, chip and week grows in exact proportion, as big as your screen will let you pull it. The width sets the zoom: pull the box wider and the calendar keeps growing even when the box is wider than it is tall — a box too short for it simply scrolls.

Two monitors? The ⧉ Pop out button at the top of the calendar lifts it into its own little window — drag that window onto your second screen and just leave it there while you plan. It keeps re-dealing itself as you edit stops and stays, it switches to night dress with the app, and tapping a stop over there still moves the map in the main window. If nothing appears, your browser blocked the pop-up — allow pop-ups for this site and press ⧉ again.

These typed times are the plan, and they exist only for planning. The moment you are actually driving, GPS is boss: the green button stamps the real departure, live arrival times come from the road and your real speed, and whatever was typed holds no rank until you plan the next trip.

Above your stops sits a green LEAVING NOW button. Press it as you pull away on the first morning and every arrival time below is worked out from that moment — 7:30 instead of 8:00, and every stop moves half an hour earlier. After that it gives way to PAUSE TRIP and RESUME TRIP (see While you are driving).

Three days later, outside a motel, press RESUME TRIP: because you are sitting at a stop, it stamps the time you leave it, and everything still ahead of you re-counts from then. A pause out on the road instead moves every time ahead on by however long you stopped. Nothing behind you moves: the stops you have already done keep the times you actually did them.

Underneath it you will see something like ✓ Left the motel at 7:14 AM with a Not yet button beside it, in case it went off in your pocket.

A stop you have already reached can also be given its leaving time from inside its own page — handy if you forgot to press the big button at the time.

Legs that run past midnight say "next day" or "day 3".

In the miles and time button you can set how long you like to drive in a day, between four and twelve hours. Anything longer than that gets flagged as a long day.

Where a day runs out

Tick Mark on the map where each day of driving ends and black arrows appear along the route at each day's worth of driving. Tap one to turn it into an overnight stop — which is the point of them.

The count starts over at every stop with a typed Leaving time, so each day's driving is measured from the stop you last planned to leave — not run in one unbroken ribbon from stop 1. While the trip is being driven, GPS is boss: the arrows count from where you actually are.

While you are driving

On the phone, press 🚗 Road up top first — Road mode puts the map, the driving strip and the five driving buttons on one screen and freezes the map against accidental taps. Everything below works the same in either mode.

Three separate things use your phone's GPS, and each has its own button:

• The GPS button (in the tools) shows a little car where you are and follows you — nothing else. No trip needed, no voice, and it never changes a trip. Drag the map to look ahead and it stops following; tap the button again to snap back to yourself, and once more to switch it off. Want someone to watch that dot? See Share just where I am. Tap the car and the You-are-here box opens for the exact spot you are standing on: bend the route through it, make it a stop, take a photo, ❤ Add to Favorites, drop 📌 Just a marker, and pick your ride on the map — a car, a Road Glide or a Gold Wing. The favorite, the marker and the ride work with no trip open at all.
• Driving a trip is the green LEAVING NOW button on the trip itself — below.
• Turn-by-turn to anywhere is the 🧭 Directions button.

LEAVING NOW, PAUSE TRIP, RESUME TRIP

Open your trip and unfold its stops. Above them sits a green LEAVING NOW. Press it as you pull away: the real time goes in and every arrival re-counts from it — leave at 7:30 instead of 8:00 and every stop moves half an hour earlier. The GPS starts following the trip's planned route, the voice guides you, stops grey out as you pass them, and live sharing comes on. LEAVING NOW is then gone for the rest of the trip.

In its place is one button that swaps between two jobs:

• PAUSE TRIP (red) rests everything — the GPS, the voice, the stop-ticking.
• RESUME TRIP (green) carries on. Paused somewhere out on the road — say half an hour at a place that is not one of your stops — and every time ahead moves on by that half hour. Paused at one of your stops — an hour at stop 2, or the night at a motel — and RESUME stamps the time you leave it, so everything ahead counts from that moment.

When the last stop is reached, it all switches itself off.

Ticking stops off

While the trip is being driven, come within about half a mile of a stop and it marks itself as reached: the card greys out and shows the time you actually got there. Otherwise, tap the ✓ on the stop card yourself (it lives in the stop's page too).

Running late

Above your stops there is a box showing the next stop you have not reached, a fresh arrival time worked out from right now, and how that compares to plan — 18 min behind, 20 min ahead, or right on plan. It uses your actual speed, so heavy traffic or a clear road both show up within a minute or two, and the new times run all the way down the list, not just to the next stop. Times following your GPS rather than the plan are marked live.

The banner along the bottom

On a phone, a strip across the bottom of the screen shows when you reach the next stop, how far is left, and the time. It never scrolls or slides — on a narrow phone the clock simply drops out rather than let anything move.

Pins you have passed

As you pass each stop its pin turns grey, so a glance at the map splits the trip into done and still to come.

The screen stays on

While the planner is open it holds your screen awake, so it does not go dark in the cradle. Switch to another app and your phone takes that back — it wakes again when you return. A phone in battery-saver mode is allowed to refuse, and that is its right.

On a phone the planner stays upright. Turn it sideways and it politely asks you to turn it back rather than squash the map.

Spoken directions and the driving view

While a trip is being driven (after LEAVING NOW), or while the 🧭 Directions button is taking you somewhere, a banner appears on the map showing the next turn: a big white arrow, the distance to it, and the words. A voice calls each turn twice — a heads-up about half a mile out, then again as you reach it. The speaker button on the banner hushes the voice; the banner keeps working silently.

The banner starts near the bottom of the map, but drag it with a finger and it goes wherever suits you — and remembers that spot on your phone from then on.

Missing a turn

Stray off the route and the voice says Recalculating — the planner asks for one fresh road from exactly where you are to your next stop, draws it as a dashed blue line, and guides you along it with a small new route tag on the banner. The moment you rejoin the planned road, the detour is thrown away: Back on the planned route. Your trip itself is never changed by any of this.

The driving view

The ⛶ button on the banner turns the phone into a sat-nav. The sidebar and top bars fold away, and the map spins so your road always points up the screen, with the little blue car standing upright in the middle. The map also leans in and out by itself: close through towns, pulled back on the open highway, and always right down close as a turn nears — nobody should be pinching a screen at sixty miles an hour. In this view the map cannot be dragged; tap ✕ on the ⛶ button to come back and browse.

Starting and stopping

On a trip, LEAVING NOW starts everything at once, and PAUSE TRIP / RESUME TRIP rest it and carry on (see While you are driving). The big red ✕ on the banner ends it all just as fast — navigation, location and sharing together — and the trip waits on RESUME TRIP. It also ends by itself when the drive stops making sense: the last stop reached, the trip deleted, or a stop removed from under the route. With compass directions, the ✕ simply stops the directions.

The old roads

In the Route menu (the button at the left of the bar under the header), 🛤 Take the old roads keeps you off the interstates and on the roads that actually go somewhere — the diners, the barns, the towns the highway forgot. Slower, and worth every minute. Pair it with Worth a look and let the route wander past something strange.

The Directions button

The 🧭 Directions button at the top-left of the header is turn-by-turn directions to anywhere, all on its own — for the days you just need to GO somewhere, now, with the voice talking.

1. Tap the compass.
2. Type where you are headed and tap the right match.
3. That is all. The planner finds where you stand, finds the road, switches the GPS on and drops straight into the driving view — voice, banner, and a new road if you miss a turn. The speaker button on the banner turns the voice on or off.

It makes no trip card and leaves your trips alone, even when one is open. It finishes by itself when you arrive; the big red ✕ on the banner stops it sooner. If you were driving a trip at the time, that trip pauses while the directions run — press RESUME TRIP to pick it back up.

The 🚗 button on a sub-stop does the same thing: directions to that exact spot.

Mini-Trips

A little trip inside a stop.

The big trip gets you to Yellowstone. The Mini-Trip is the handful of places you mean to wander once you are there — inside the stop, not cluttering the route. Open the stop and the Mini-Trip section offers three buttons:

• 🎯 Sub-stop — tap the map closes the panel; your next tap on the map drops a little gold dot there and adds it to the list. Or skip the panel entirely: tap the map anywhere and the what-should-this-spot-be question now offers Sub-stop (Mini-Trip) too — and then asks Under which stop? so you pick the home base yourself. Day headings carry a ✏ too: tap it to name the day — "Caverns day" reads better than "Day trip 2" — and the name follows the day if you swap days around; leave the box empty to go back to plain numbers, which always count from 1 in the order shown. A sub-stop gets its own name the same way: tap its gold dot on the map and type in the name box at the top of the little box that opens. The same 🎯 Sub-stop… button sits on every place popup — parks, stadiums, ghost towns, Worth a look finds — with the same question, and next to it a 📌 Just a marker button drops a thumbtack on the place instead, keeping its name, so you can collect maybes without committing to anything. (The map-tap question offers 📌 Just a marker too — a thumbtack that is not a stop, not on the route: drag it around while you think. Tap any marker when it grows up and it asks: make it a stop, add it to a Mini-Trip — with a second question for which stop it belongs under — add it to ❤ Favorites, or remove it. The same menu has a name box at the top: type your own name for the marker — "scout this campground" — press Enter, and it shows on the marker's tooltip and carries over if it ever becomes a stop. Above the name sits the marker's category from your legend — see Your marker legend under Adding stops — and below it a notes box for the spot.)
• 📷 Take a photo opens the camera and keeps the picture in the Mini-Trip, pinned where you stand.
• 🖼 Pick from gallery does the same with a picture you already have.

Open a Mini-Trip's ▾ and it also draws itself on the map as a real route: the actual roads out from the stop, through its sub-stops in order, and back to the stop — a day trip is a loop, and the miles and minutes under the tree are the whole circle: 🚗 14 mi · 31 min round trip. The map leans in to frame the little journey, and closing the arrow tidies it away. Each Mini-Trip's road is remembered, so opening and closing it again costs nothing; only a changed Mini-Trip asks the map service afresh.

Once a Mini-Trip exists, its stop card in the list grows a ▾ arrow — the same kind the stops drawer uses. Tap it and the little cards unfold underneath: each sub-stop with its number, a 🚗 GPS-me-there button (spoken directions straight to that spot, the same as the 🧭 Directions button), a 🌤 forecast button, ▴▾ arrows to put them in order, and ✕ to take one out. Tap a sub-stop to centre the map on it; tap a photo one to see its pictures. No arrow, no Mini-Trip — the card stays exactly as it was.

Mini-Trips are deliberately simple: no routing, no arrival times, no budget. The big trip does the travelling; the Mini-Trip just remembers the plan for the visit, and it travels with the trip wherever the trip goes — export, sync and Plan it together alike.

Several day trips from one stop

A hotel can be home base for a whole week of outings. Press ➕ New day trip in the stop's Mini-Trip section and the next sub-stops start a separate little journey — their own 1-2-3, their own tree under the card (headed 🗓 Day trip 2), their own routed line on the map and their own miles. Tap a day trip's heading to make it the one new sub-stops join. A whole trip folded in with the 📎 arrives as its own day trip.

Day trips can be reshaped after the fact. The ✂ on a sub-stop splits its day: that spot and everything after it break off into a new day trip (planned too much for one day — snip it in half). The ▴▾ arrows on a day's heading swap whole days about, so Tuesday's outing becomes Wednesday's in one tap. And on a computer the little cards drag: slide a sub-stop up and down its day, or clean across into another day — drop it on a card for an exact seat, or on a day's heading to join the end of that day. Routes and mileage sort themselves out after every change.

Made it as its own trip by mistake?

If what you meant as a Mini-Trip ended up as a brand-new trip card, the 📎 paperclip on that trip card fixes it: pick which trip and which stop, and every stop of the accidental trip becomes a sub-stop there — photos and all. The accidental trip card is then deleted; the undo arrow brings it back if you change your mind.

Inside a stop

The three-line button on a stop card opens it. At the top, under the name, the stop shows its street address, worked out from where the pin sits. Tap a business or a landmark and the stop names itself after it — the distillery, the diner, the state park. A stop on somebody's house simply says Private home; the address still shows, but no family name ever goes on a pin. A name you type yourself is never changed.

Below that you get its notes, its photos, the weather there, and three tucked-away lines:

• 🔍 Find nearby — type gas, food, coffee, a museum — anything — and the results appear right there in the panel, nearest first, each saying how far it sits from the stop — and how far from you, when the app knows your location. Numbered pins drop onto the map at the same time so you can see which find is which — tap a pin (or its line in the list) for a little flag with + Add stop in it. Press it and the place becomes a stop in your trip — its own name, at its own spot. The pins are only visitors: close the panel and they sweep themselves away, or press the 🧹 broom tool (Tidy the map) to clear them (and any search results, radar, ghost towns, roadside oddities or 🍽 Golden Corral pins) whenever you like — your route and stops are never touched.
• Find somewhere to stay here — Booking, Expedia, Hotels.com and Airbnb, already searching that place for your trip dates. Priceline is listed separately because their links cannot carry a place name.
• Rent a car here — Kayak, Expedia and Turo carry the place and your dates; Priceline and Enterprise open their own search page.

They are folded away on purpose. A stop is about your trip first; booking is there when you ask for it.

Photos

Worth reading properly — this one surprises people.

You can take a photo or pick one from your gallery inside any stop. What the app stores is a reduced copy. Your original never moves: it stays in your phone's Photos or Files at full size, untouched.

Why it works that way

A browser gives a website roughly five megabytes of storage. A single modern phone photo can be four megabytes on its own. If the app kept originals it would fill up after one or two pictures and stop saving anything at all.

What that means in practice

• Only the small copy travels between your devices, so a photo will look softer on a big screen than the original does on your phone.
• If a trip's photos are too large to send, the trip syncs without them and says photos stayed on this device. Nothing is lost — those pictures are still on the phone that took them, and still in your gallery at full size.
• Photos you save out of the app carry that stop's location written into the file, so your own gallery can place them on a map.

Saving them out

Inside a photo there is Save photo, and a stop with several has Save all photos. To save every picture from the whole trip at once, use the photos button with the tool buttons — they come out named so they sort themselves into order, and each carries the place it was taken.

Photos on the map

Once every stop on the trip has been ticked off as reached, your photos come out onto the map: each one pinned beside the stop it was taken at, fanned out so they never cover each other, with a short line back to the pin. Tap any of them to see it full size.

They wait for the whole trip to be finished on purpose. Half-way through a drive you want the map clear for the road ahead; once you are home, that same map becomes a record of where you went. Stops tick themselves off as you reach them while the trip is being driven, or tap the ✓ on a stop card yourself.

The Fun stuff menu

One tool button — the popcorn, clapperboard and game pad — opens a menu of the playful things, so the map's edge and the tool row stay tidy:

• Audiobooks & podcasts comes first — see Audiobooks, podcasts and Audible.
• Ghost towns & haunted places, Golden Corral, NFL stadiums and College stadiums are switches — the pill on the right says ON or OFF, and a press flips it without leaving the menu. The map remembers each one.
• States I've Been To opens your sticker map over the planning map, with a red ✕ Close in the bar across the top.
• Treasure hunt, Time capsules, Car games and Voice memories open their own panels, just as their old buttons did.

Three other things came off the map's edge onto the tool row: Roadside oddities (the yellow sign — lit while the pins show), ❤ Favorites (the heart) and Tidy the map (the broom). The map's left edge keeps only the rain cloud and the thermometer.

Weather and radar

Each stop has a 7-day forecast for that exact place. The rain radar has its own rain-cloud button with the tool buttons — press it and live rain lays over the whole map; it stays lit while the radar is showing, and pressing it again switches it off.

There is also a cloud button on the map itself, under the zoom buttons, which does the same thing. It goes blue while it is on.

The radar is the National Weather Service picture, refreshed every few minutes. It shows rain falling right now, not a forecast — so a clear map means no rain, not a broken radar. It covers the United States.

🌡 Temperatures right now. The button right under the radar button lays the current temperatures over the map as numbers, the way the TV weather map does it — the whole country at once or one state up close, each badge coloured from cold blue to hot red, in the units you chose. They follow the map as you pan and zoom, refresh every ten minutes, and only land gets a number (the Gulf and the oceans stay clear). The badges are not tappable on purpose, so a weather map never steals a tap meant for the map underneath. Press the button again to switch them off; the 🧹 broom tool sweeps them off with everything else.

Checklists and budget

Checklists

Make as many lists as you like — packing, errands, whatever. Alongside + Add item there is ☰ Pick from common items: eighty-odd things people actually pack, in eight groups, from socks and toothpaste to jumper cables and pre-bought tickets. Tick what applies and add them all at once. Anything already on your list is greyed out.

Budget

Four sections — gas, lodging, restaurants and everything else — each with its own running total, plus a grand total and an optional limit.

Trip dates live in the banner at the top — From and To, right there on every trip. Notes belong to the stop they are about: open any stop and write them there.

Reminders

The bell button sets nudges before you go — pack, rent a car, book the hotel, service the vehicle, hold the mail. Dates are suggested from your trip start and can be changed.

Reminders in the app are only a list — it is your phone's own calendar that actually rings. There are two ways to get them across, because no single way works on every phone.

• 📅 Add to Google Calendar — the quickest, and the one to use on an Android phone. Google Calendar opens with the reminder already filled in: name, date, time, and an alert half an hour before. Press Save there, come back, and the button has moved on to the next one — Next one — 2 of 3, and so on until they are all in.
• 📅 All at once (calendar file) — better on an iPhone, where your calendar opens holding the lot and offers Add All. On Android or a computer this saves a calendar file instead: open that file and your calendar takes them in.

Reminders without a date cannot become calendar entries, so those are left out and the panel tells you how many.

Photo Stops

For the things you pull over for and would never have planned.

A barn in good light, a view, a daft sign. Tap the little car while the location button is on, or drop a point on the road, and choose 📷 Take a photo. The camera opens, and where you are standing becomes a slim red Photo Stop card carrying that picture, with a small red camera pin on the map.

They are deliberately not dressed up like places you meant to visit. Opening one gives you the pictures and nothing else: look at them big, add another, save them to your phone, delete one, or remove the stop. No notes, no weather, no hotels, no searches — it is a photo, not an itinerary.

They still take their turn in the numbering, so the numbers on the map always match the numbers on your cards.

Treasure hunts and time capsules

The map keeps secrets now.

Hiding a treasure

Open Treasure hunt in the Fun stuff menu (the popcorn tool button), give the treasure a name and a hint — “knee height, look north” — and hide it right where you stand, or press 🎯 Pick the spot on the map and your next tap places it. Tapping the map works the other way round too: the what-should-this-spot-be question now offers Hide a treasure alongside stop and photo.

Then turn Hunt mode ON. That is the blindfold: hunters see only a dashed gold circle and the hint — and the circle is deliberately off-centre from the real spot, so its middle gives nothing away. Walk into the circle with the location dot on and, at about 150 feet, the map gives the spot away: the real pin appears and the voice says so. Found the real thing? Tap the pin to log the find, time and all. The panel keeps score, and a found treasure can be put back in play with Hide again for the next hunter.

Sealing a time capsule

Time capsules (in the Fun stuff menu) seals a message at a place instead: who it is for, the words, and the spot. It shows on the map as a little gift box that says only who it is for — the words stay secret. When someone reaches the spot with the location dot on, it opens by itself: the message appears, the voice announces it, confetti falls. Grandma writes it before the trip; it opens at the Grand Canyon.

Putting them on someone else's phone

Treasures and capsules hidden with a trip open live inside that trip, so share the trip with Planning it together and they ride along — hunt mode, hints, circles and all. (Ones hidden with no trip open live in your own bag — see Without a trip — and follow your account, not a trip.) Their finds and openings sync back to you, so you can watch the score from home. A meetup group does not carry them: meetups share routes only.

Car games and voice memories

The back seat's own screen

Car games (in the Fun stuff menu) holds two classics that need no signal and no batteries beyond the phone's. License Plate Bingo: all fifty states, tap each plate you spot, with cheers at ten, twenty-five and the full fifty. Road Bingo: a 5×5 card dealt fresh from a pool of forty-eight roadside sights — a red barn, a dog riding in a truck, a dinosaur statue — with a free star in the middle. Tap what you spot; five in a row is a bingo and the whole map celebrates. Fill the card for a blackout, or deal a new one whenever the back seat demands a rematch. The score belongs to the trip, so the game carries on after every stop for lunch — and with no trip open there is a scoreboard of your own that needs none (see Without a trip).

Voice memories

Voice memories (in the Fun stuff menu) records up to thirty seconds of a real voice — “this is where we saw the eagle” — and pins it to the exact spot where it was said. Tap the little microphone pin, next week or in five years, and hear it again. Want to choose the spot yourself? Tick 📍 After recording, let me tap the map to place it before you record — when the recording stops, your next tap on the map is where it lives. And 📍 Move beside any saved memory re-pins it wherever you point. Keep them short: sound takes more room than words, and it lives in the phone's own storage alongside the photos.

Sharing a trip

A page anyone can look at, and nobody can change.

The share button in the side tools publishes a read-only page of your trip: the map, the route, the stops and up to a dozen photos. You get a short link like …/s/9gqmtkjahh to paste anywhere.

Your notes, your budget and your reminders are never included. Those stay on your device.

Paste the link into a Facebook group and it opens out into a proper preview card with the trip name and mileage. There is also a 🌐 Share on Facebook button that opens Facebook's own share window with the link ready — you pick the group there and add whatever you want to say. No app has been allowed to post straight into a group for years, so that last press is always yours.

You stay in charge of it. Update the shared copy pushes today's version to the same link, so anything already pasted starts showing the newer trip. Stop sharing takes the page down for everyone.

Watch us drive

Someone at home watching your car move along the route, live.

In the share panel, under 🚗 Watch us drive, press Start live sharing. You get a second, private link — …/w/… — quite separate from the trip page above, so a link you pasted to a whole Facebook group never shows where you are.

Send that link to whoever is keeping an eye on you. They need no account: the link is the invitation. They see your route with a green car on it, a badge reading On the road now · 64 mph · seen just now, and the car moving every few seconds as you drive.

It reports while the planner is open and the trip is being driven — from LEAVING NOW, and again after each RESUME TRIP. If your phone loses signal in the hills the page says last seen 12 min ago rather than pretending. Press Stop the live sharing when you arrive and their page reads Drive finished.

Share just where I am

No trip at all — an errand late at night, and someone at home would like to see you get there and back. Switch on the GPS button, then press Share with no trip open (or, with a trip open, Share just where I am… at the bottom of its share panel) and press Start sharing where I am. Send them the link: they see your dot moving on a map, and nothing else — no route, no stops, no trip made. It reports while the GPS button is on; Stop sharing ends it.

Planning it together

Up to five of you, one trip, everybody editing.

On a trip you have unlocked, open the share panel and find 👥 Plan it together. Type the email address the other person signs in with, and press Invite. That is the whole ceremony — no email is sent, you just tell them.

Next time they are signed in, the trip appears in their list by itself, marked 👥 shared by …, and they can edit all of it without paying again — your unlock covers the trip. Their changes reach you and yours reach them, on the same quiet sync that already keeps your phone and computer in step. If you both change the same thing in the same minute, the later save wins.

You can invite up to four others — five of you in all. And it is the whole trip that flows between you: the car games scoreboard, sealed time capsules, the treasure hunt and its hints, and voice memories all ride the same sync, so a bingo square ticked in one car shows up in the other. You can remove someone at any time. If they remove it from their own list they are only stepping away — your trip is untouched, and the app says so before they do it (they can hide it instead, which you never notice). And if you delete the trip and later import its saved file, it comes back as the same trip and everyone you invited gets it back without a new invitation.

Meeting up

This one is for a family scattered across the country, all driving to one place. It is different from planning together: there, several people edit one trip. Here, up to ten people each drive their own trip — from their own town, with their own stops — all aimed at the same meetup spot.

To start a group: open your trip, press the share button, and under 🚩 Meet up together press Start or join a group. Type your name and press Start. The meetup spot is your trip's final stop, and you become the group leader. You get a short code, like M7KQ2X — text it to the others. Anyone in the group can pass the code along; it works the same no matter who sends it.

To join: press the same button, type your name and the code — and a brand-new trip appears in your list, named the same as the leader's, holding the meetup spot as its final stop. Your other trips are untouched. Tap the map at home to add your starting point: on a meetup trip, new stops always slot in before the meetup spot, which stays glued last, so your route reads start → your stops → meetup. Everyone in a group is signed in, and the group itself is proof of payment — a meetup trip is never locked.

What everyone sees: each person's trip card carries the group, with the leader named. At the top of the stops list, just above the big green leaving button, sit two buttons side by side — 🚩 Their Routes and 📡 Live Sharing. Like the GPS button, green means on, red means off. Their Routes draws every route in the group on your map at once — yours in colour, everyone else's in black, with a name tag on each person's starting town and a flag on the meetup spot. Live Sharing reports your car while you drive, so the group can watch you come in. On their phone, their route is the coloured one. Nobody needs a legend.

The group keeps itself fresh: while their routes are on your map, or the group panel is open, everything refetches about every half minute on its own — when someone adds a stop, you simply see it appear.

You edit only your own route. Add a stop for lunch on your way and the group sees your route change; nobody can touch it but you.

The fun belongs to the whole convoy. The group shares one car games scoreboard, one treasure hunt, and one batch of sealed time capsules: tick a bingo square in one car and it ticks in all of them, hide a treasure and every phone can hunt it, seal a capsule and it opens on whichever phone arrives. If two cars play the very same minute, the later change wins — same rule as everything else. Voice memories deliberately stay each person's own — recordings are heavy, and ten phones trading sound files would slow the whole group down. Notes, photos and budgets stay private too, same as a trip page.

While anyone is live-driving with Watch us drive, a 🚗 Watch them drive button appears on their row in the group panel, for everyone.

Better still, on a meetup trip a third button sits beside Their Routes and Live Sharing: 🚙 Convoy. Switch it on and the group's live cars appear on your own map — a little car and a name tag for everyone who has live sharing on, with their speed while they are moving, refreshed every fifteen seconds. Two families driving to the same reunion can each watch the other come in, without anyone's route, notes or photos changing hands.

Only the leader can move the meetup spot — everyone's trip follows it. If the leader closes the group, it closes for everyone, but nobody's own trip is touched.

Printing

The printer button asks what you want:

• 📖 The storybook — the trip told back as a keepsake. See The storybook below.
• Just the trip — a cover page with the trip name, dates and total mileage, then the stops, notes, checklists, budget and turn-by-turn directions.
• Trip with a map for each leg — all of the above, then a page of small maps, one per leg, each framed on that stretch of road with the numbered stops at both ends.

In the print window, choose Save as PDF as the destination to keep a copy instead of printing.

The storybook

Google gets you there. This is for afterwards.

While you travelled, the planner was quietly collecting the story: the road you actually drove, the times you really arrived, the photos pinned where they were taken, the notes, the treasures found, the messages opened, what it all cost. After the trip, press the printer button and choose 📖 The storybook — and it hands the story back as a book.

A cover with the trip's name and its miles. A page for every stop: We got there Saturday, June 14 at 2:12, the photos, the notes in your own words. The treasures and when they were found. The capsule messages, now open. The cost — worked out per mile, and worth every cent. And a closing page that asks: Same time next year?

Choose Save as PDF in the print window and it is yours forever — one for each grandchild who was in the car.

One year later

The planner remembers dates as well as places. Open it on a day you were somewhere wonderful a year or more ago and it will mention it, once — One year ago today, you were at Mammoth Cave — with a button that replays that journey, photos and all. It never asks twice in a day, and if you just carry on, it lets you.

The journey video

The play button runs your trip like a little film. The app clears away, and a car drives your actual route, turning with the road. At each stop it pauses, shows the name and notes, then each photo — which shrinks and flies to that stop on the map, where it stays as a small thumbnail joined to the pin by a line.

By the end you have a map of the whole trip with the pictures pinned where they were taken. Tap any of them to look properly. Nothing closes until you press Close.

Once the trip is over — every stop ticked off as reached — those photos stay on the ordinary map as well, not just during the journey.

While it plays

• − and + move the camera closer or further away. The car slows down as you zoom in, so it always crosses the screen at a sensible pace.
• Tilt leans the map back so the road runs off into the distance. Try it with the satellite map.
• The speed slider runs from a quarter speed to twelve times, and can be moved while it plays. Slowing it down gives you longer on each photo.

Saving it as a video

When you press play you are asked whether to just watch it, or film it in one of three shapes: wide for a screen, tall for a phone, or square. Choose a shape and your browser asks which window to record — pick this tab. The journey then plays through on its own, the recording stops by itself at the last stop, and you are asked whether to keep it. Saving opens a normal Save As window. The speed, zoom, tilt and Stop controls stay on screen the whole time — they sit below the frame, where the recording never sees them, so you can change the pace mid-film.

The file is cropped to just the map at the sharpest size your screen allows — no browser edges, no sidebar. It is yours to share anywhere.

Worth a look

The lightbulb button finds places worth stopping for — theme parks, zoos, caves, museums, monuments, beaches, viewpoints, historic sites, even wineries — straight from TomTom's own place records, the same ones the sat-navs run on.

It works two ways. Look along my route walks your actual drive and shows what is near it, saying how far each one is off your road. Look at what is on screen searches whatever part of the country you are looking at — useful when you know you want to go somewhere but not where. Move the map, zoom to about a county at a time, and look.

Each result says what sort of place it is and how far off it sits. Add as a stop drops it into your route. The only outside link you will ever see is The story, which goes to Wikipedia and nowhere else — places' own websites are not linked, because nobody checks where those actually lead.

Below those sit the 🪐 Odd & storied buttons — a second, entirely separate well. They ask Wikipedia what is nearby: anything strange or storied enough to have earned itself an encyclopedia page. Ghost towns, giant roadside things, old battlefields, odd little museums, places where something happened. Each card carries a one-line answer to "what is this?", and The story opens the full page when you want the tale. Free, unlimited, and if one well runs dry for the day the other still pours.

Or skip the list entirely. The ⭐ star button in the blue tool row pins the cool places straight onto the map wherever you are looking — 🎢 theme parks, 🌲 parks and forests, 🏖 beaches, 🏛 museums, 🪐 the odd and storied. A place found is a place kept: everywhere you have ever looked goes into a collection on your device, for good, even after the app is closed. Each patch of country is asked about once and then remembered — museums do not pack up and move overnight — so wandering the map costs next to nothing. To stay quick, the map carries only the pins near where you are looking; glance back at anywhere you have been and its pins are standing right where they were, straight from the collection, no fetching. Tap any pin to see what it is; one more press and it is a stop on your route. Turning the star off only stops new pins arriving — the 🧹 broom tool (Tidy the map) is the one thing that sweeps the pins off the map, and the star stands them right back up whenever you want them.

The map keeps a strict guest list. Only the worth-stopping-for sorts are ever pinned: the major amusement parks, national parks, national forests, state parks, aquariums, zoos, observatories, NASA and SpaceX sites, historic bridges, canyons, caves, 💎 diamond and crystal mines you can dig at, escape rooms with their own door-and-key pin — and the roadside oddities, from the world's-largest things to ghost towns. Wineries and museums don't pin themselves — when you want one, the search will find it. Airports, churches, shops, city parks, visitor centers, fairgrounds, markers, art in every form, and the names of creeks and lakes never make the map: they are not the trip. Museums don't pin themselves either — when you want one, the buttons above will find it.

👥 Found a cool place? Share it with all travelers. A marker's menu, a stop's page and a sub-stop's dot box each have ⭐ Share with all travelers. Press it and the app asks — every time, on purpose: a relative's house or a friend's cabin is not a cool place, so nothing is ever shared until you say so. Check the name, add one line if you like ("best pie in three counties"), press Share it, and the spot joins the ⭐ Cool places layer for every traveler who uses this app, wearing the legend pin you gave it with a little 👥 on the corner. If the place is already on the map — from the map's own lists or from another traveler — nothing is added and the app simply says so. Shared pins show who-knows-what in their popup: "Shared by a fellow traveler", the category, the sharer's line, and the usual Add-as-a-stop, Sub-stop and Just-a-marker buttons. Anyone can press 🚩 Not a cool place? on a shared pin — it leaves your map at once, and when three different people say so it leaves everyone's. Whoever shared a place can take it back from its popup. Sharing needs a free sign-in, so a wrong one can always be traced and taken down.

🏈 Every football stadium in America, hand-placed. All thirty-two NFL teams and all one hundred thirty-six FBS college programs — every stadium researched and placed by hand, not fetched, not guessed. They show at every zoom, whole-country included. They start tucked away — two helmet rows in the Fun stuff menu wake them: the blue PRO helmet for the NFL, the red COLLEGE helmet for the colleges — the pill on the right reads ON, and the map remembers your choice. Tap any helmet for the stadium and its team, and one press adds it to your route. Where a college shares an NFL building, the two helmets stand side by side.

👻 And a separate animal entirely: the spooky layer. The ghost row in the Fun stuff menu holds nearly three thousand ghost towns and reportedly haunted places — every one notable enough to carry a Wikipedia page, and the whole collection travels inside the app, asking nothing of the internet. Ghosts keep to close quarters: the pins only appear once you zoom right in. 👻 marks a town that was; 🏚 marks a place with stories. Tap one for the tale, add it as a stop if you dare. The broom sweeps them home.

🛣 And its cheerful cousin: roadside oddities. The yellow-sign tool button (it lights while the pins show) holds hundreds of the things America builds by the highway to make you pull over — the world's largest ball of twine, muffler men, Carhenge, the shoe house, dinosaur parks, gravity hills, folk-art yards, giant statues. Gathered once from Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap and carried inside the app, so it costs nothing and sends you nowhere. They show once you zoom in to a state or so. Tap one: the story when Wikipedia has it (some come from OpenStreetMap and say so), then Add as a stop, 🎯 Sub-stop for a day trip, or 📌 Just a marker to think about it. The ghosts and the oddities switch on and off separately — pick your mood.

🍽 Golden Corral, all of them. The Golden Corral row in the Fun stuff menu pins every Golden Corral in the country — three hundred and thirty-one of them, carried inside the app like the others. Handy when the crew has been in the car all day and wants a proper sit-down supper. They show once you zoom in to a state or so. Tap a pin for the street address and the phone number, then Add as a stop, 🎯 Sub-stop, or 📌 Just a marker. It is a list taken on one day, not a live feed — restaurants do close, so ring ahead before a long detour.

Apart from that one plate, the map is built for the notable and the outdoors rather than shops and restaurants. For those, use Find nearby inside a stop, which searches the map properly.

Either way, check opening hours before you drive somewhere. Places close.

Installing it

The planner can sit on your phone or your desktop like any other app, with its own icon and its own window — no address bar, no tabs.

• On a phone: open the planner in your browser, then use the browser menu and choose Add to Home Screen. It appears as Trip Planner.
• On a computer: in Chrome or Edge, an install icon appears at the right-hand end of the address bar. Click it and the planner gets its own window and a desktop shortcut.

It is the same app either way — the same account, the same trips. Installing simply gets the browser out of the way.

Settings worth knowing

• Your Home — the ⚙ wheel up top, just left of the ?: the usual starting place, set once by address, by tapping the map, or from where you stand, and offered as stop 1 on every new trip. See Your Home.
• Miles or kilometres — in the miles and time button. Changes every distance in the app, and switches the weather between °F and °C.
• Map style — the layers box at the map's top right: roads, night, satellite or terrain. The satellite pictures now carry road and town names over the top of them.
• Undo and redo — the two arrows just in front of the From and To dates walk back and forward through everything you have done, including deleted trips. Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y work too.
• The GPS button — the target — turns green while it is watching you and stays red while it is not, so there is never any doubt. Any tool that is busy doing something (its panel open, the rain showing) sits on a green tile.
• The tool buttons fold flat — the slim ▾ bar above the blue tool buttons tucks the whole tray away so the trip list gets the room; the same bar brings it back. The app remembers which way you left it. Every tool is a picture now — see The tool buttons for the row, one by one.

Getting help inside the app

• Press and hold any button for half a second and it tells you what it does, without doing it. Let go and nothing happens.
• The ? button in the header is the quick tour — the main ideas on one screen, with What has changed lately and the version you are running at the bottom. The ⚙ wheel beside it holds your Home, and the 🚗 Road button on the other side is Road mode.
• This page is the long version, for when the quick answer is not enough.

Still stuck, or something is behaving oddly? Write to smitt@jaysmittlabs.com and a person will answer.

What it costs

Planning is free. Keeping what you planned is what you pay for.

Build as much as you like before deciding anything — stops, the route, timings, the lot. Nothing is held back while you work. What needs paying for is keeping it: saving the trip to your account, having it on your phone, opening it again tomorrow, editing it on the road, and making the journey video.

What happens if you stop

A trip you bought outright is yours permanently and nothing changes.

Trips made under a yearly plan stay in your account and stay readable once it ends — you can open them, look at the route, the stops, the photos and the video. To edit them again, either renew, or buy that individual trip outright and it becomes yours for good.

Unlocking a trip is also what lets you share the planning of it with someone else — see Planning it together. They do not pay again.

Payments are handled by PayPal. We never see or store your card details.