As I progress into my dotage I suspect that I will regaling increasingly bored people with stories that will nearly always begin with “When I was in…”. Doubtless many tales will evolve in to more wild and whacky versions, freed from any reality as my mind slips and embellishes the gaps. At least it will fill some hours between my shifts as a greeter at Walmart. In the interest of maintaining some connection with actual events I went looking for an app to record my travel progress. Nothing too in depth, just a few details.
I chose PolarSteps and it works well. Granted location access on my ‘phone it plots my physical progress across the surface of the earth. From what I can see it pings GPS every few hours but uses very little battery power. When you are comfortably settled on that long train ride to Toulouse, open up the app and fill in the gaps. Add photos, or approve the ones that PolarSteps suggest, along with some verbiage, for any or all points along the way. I have included one location, one sentence of text and one photo for every day of my nomadic life. I reckon that pictures of ‘me in front of things’ would bore even me, and there are much better pictures of every Duomo available from Mr Googles, so my photos tend to be of things that are quirky, absurd, or surprising to me.
The app does really take some time to grok out, so take it on a test drive for a month or so before you actually launch your travels. I added things in the wrong places and confused the hell out of the timeline, so the trace of the first period of my travel looks a little insane. It really starts to gum up and slow down as the trip gets longer, so best to create a new trip record at least once a year. There are some glaring feature failures, such as the intro photo of where you have been that you cannot capture. And flight paths that obscure your destinations but that are supposedly deletable. In emails with the frankly charming development team it is clear that this is not an evolving app. Be aware that the app only supports a single device so do not (as I did) try editing from different devices.
You can send a link to your PolarSteps timeline to anyone and everyone in response to their ‘where have you been?’ inquiry. If your experience is anything like mine they appear super interested for about a day, and then never look at it again.
One fun feature is ‘buy a travel book’. This grabs all the steps that you choose in your timeline, using the date parameters that you set. This can be some work to edit and include specific steps. But then an elf somewhere in the world magically produces a hard cover book filled with your pictures, narrative, location (and, oddly, weather at each step) and delivers it covertly to wherever in the world you are getting your mail. The production is very high quality, and the price is shockingly modest. I reckon that it is insurance against the inevitable day that all my digital data gets lost. It also will serve as a prop in my mobile home that will remind me to bore my guest with a story.
I also use the simple and fun Visited app. It does a good job of storing the list of countries, regions and cities that you feed it.