Travel Apps Archives

Essential Travel Apps: 112 Iceland

August 25, 2014 By Katy Leave a Comment

For many visitors to Iceland, outdoor adventure is the main goal. And who could resist? With a million-and-one breathtaking places to explore, wild camping, and the ease and relative safety of hitchhiking, more and more people are looking to Iceland as a destination for some serious adventure.

There are many risks to this kind of travel. Iceland’s weather is fickle, unpredictable, and can turn severely bad at any moment. It can be easy to get lost seemingly-endless otherworldly landscape. There can be a pretty large distance between towns, and sometimes days-long gaps in traffic (even on the ring road), making it difficult to find help if something were to go wrong. [Read more…]

Essential Travel Apps: TurboScan

May 12, 2014 By Katy Leave a Comment

So you’re headed on a long trip and you want to make sure you have all of your important documents backed up and readily accessible. Do you buy a scanner? Spending over $100 just to have a copy of your passport on hand seems excessive. What about bringing your documents to a copy shop like Kinko’s? Possible, but inconvenient, and who wants to have their passport number available to more people than necessary? Or trip confirmations available to strangers?

As I am scanner-less, I’ve spent a lot of time looking for a good/secure solution to this problem. A friend recently directed me to TurboScan, which he had used for handouts from his university classes, and I was hooked! [Read more…]

Essential Travel Apps: Trover

March 24, 2014 By Katy 1 Comment

I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of a lazy travel planner. Though I’ll often read the basics about where I’m going (neighborhoods, major attractions, etc) I generally rely on walking around and talking to people to find the things I want to see, do, or eat. While this works out some of the time, I really need to work on planning more things in advance.

In rides Trover, my lazy-planning knight in shining armor. Trover is a free website and app (available for both iPhone and Android) which allows users to post photos (or “discoveries” as they call them), geotag them, and add a description. The app combines all of the positive elements of Yelp, Instagram, FourSquare, and Pinterest, but without all of the extra BS. [Read more…]