Tools of the Trip Planning Trade
Apologies in advance for the lack of aesthetic, location-based photographs, this isn’t one of those kinds of posts. There are images from the apps I talk about, but if you’re not very interested in trip planning or not into software, then you may want to skip this one. But if you are interested, well, this is what we’ve been using to plan our latest trips.
Trip planning is always one of those odd things - why go somewhere? What do you want to do once you get there? Where, really, is “there”? You might have some desire to go to Tahiti because you studied Gauguin in art school, or the Swiss Alps because you fancied The Sound of Music. Or you hear about photographic Meccas like Scotland or Iceland, so that’s where you want to go. The thing is, none of these places are particularly small and if you want to do something like photography, you need to know where in the location you might want to go. Yellowstone is, to borrow a word the guys used to use a lot, ginormous. So is Tahiti, the Alps (Swiss or otherwise), Scotland and Iceland. Your chances of making a decent photograph (and seeing locations you’re actually interested in) increases when you do a bit of research and planning (do not stay at a hotel four hours away from your desired sunrise photography location, do not fly into Berlin if you’re thinking of a weekend ski trip to the Alps).
So our trip planning starts with some sort of notion that there is a location we might want to go to. We find that any number of ways, everything from the well known photography wise (Scotland), to seeing a photograph on a website (I wonder where that waterfall is at?), to google searches (“old beech forests Europe”). From there, we do a bit more digging (Google images is great for the quick view of a place - but often very limited and many of the same shot from the “scenic” location). Many times, we decide we’re not interested - lots of places are one view and that’s it. Other times, we perk up and it’s time to dig a bit more. Even then, there are a lot of dead-ends, but you never find the good places without searching.
YouTube is a great way to get a rough feel for an area, even if it can be painful at times. Everything from bad video making to really annoying YouTube hosts can make watching difficult. Still, they can be very informative to answer questions like, “Where in Lofoton should we go?” We watch not only photography videos, but overloading (car, caravan or motorcycle) videos of folks traveling through the different areas. I’m as often looking at the wider range of photographic opportunities in the surroundings than the particular location or view that is the subject of the moment (it is often the “in-between” places between the highlight “destinations” that Ann and I find the most interesting and rewarding photographically). Sure, a castle at the end of a cliff might be interesting to photograph, but if they’re photographing from a rocky shore that would present a field day of images for me, I’m much more interested in the shore location than the castle. Anyway, YouTube can be a gold mine.
Invariably the research turns into a trip to Google Maps and occasionally Google Earth simply for their ease of use. It can tell us everything from how we can get there, to broader information like associated google images, what type of restaurants are in the area, campgrounds, etc as you zoom in farther and farther and do a “search in this area” search.
We also haven’t abandoned traditional maps, which often come after we’ve decided on a location. Part of me is old school and I don’t like going out without a hard map regardless of how many different electronic devices with maps I have with me. There’s something about leaning over a table looking over a map that sitting at a computer just can’t match. On that front, Amazon to the rescue - we can usually get maps in English from one of the several Amazon stores in the EU.
One of the tools I discovered in Europe that I never used in the US was Location Scout. I discovered it when I was trip planning for the return trip from Munich to Braga in the bimobil. Yes, the one that never happened. I had a nice route planned that stopped off at some lovely waterfalls in the Black Forest, a trip to Ronchamp (a Le Corbusier church in France), more waterfalls near the French Alps (in an area we discovered from a motorcycle overlander on YouTube), a stop off in the Pyrenees and then a couple stops on the north coast (rocky) of Spain. Most of those locations were found using Location Scout. It doesn’t cover everything, but there are images from most locations and they are taken by photographers, so they are usually interesting (for the most part). Location scout is particularly useful when you know you’re going to stop somewhere between destinations, and want to see if there are any potential shooting locations in the area where you’ll be spending the night - it might just determine precisely where to spend that night.
Many of the nicer photo locations are not right off the road, unfortunately. Once you think you want to explore an area, it’s time to find hikes that might get you where you want to be (or at least to a location that might be a bit interesting). When you do some research about the 200-year old beech trees in the Kellerwald-Edersee National Park and you find out it’s in the Ringelsberg part of the park, you have to ask yourself, “Where is that? And how do you get there?” Alltrails is the way to go. Of course, they have a desktop and a mobile version, so you can track yourself once you’re on your hike
Another tool that is useful that we discovered in Europe is Wikiloc, which is a wiki for hiking trails. A guy we met in Portugal turned us on to it. Again, there are lots of trails, some with linked images, and, most of all, they generally have elevation levels for the hike, so you can see if you have to climb 3,000 feet as part of the hike (2-dimensional maps, even too maps can be very deceiving). I’m not as young, fit or agile as I used to be (ok, and I’m a whole lot fatter now too), so when given an option of a photographically interesting route that climbs a couple of thousand feet and an equally photographically interesting route that only climbs a few hundred feet, well I’ll opt for the few hundred feet thank you very much. Despite what Len has to say, I’m not as stupid as I look.
Trips aren’t all about photographing though. You’ve got to sleep at some point, so that’s where Park4Night comes in. The app we used to use - Allstays - doesn’t recognize the existence of Europe, so we had to find an alternative. Park4Night works great for Europe (less so for the US), so that’s our tool. It helps us find overnight campgrounds, locations where we can park for the day and other locations a person in a motorhome may be interested in.
Of course, once you’ve compiled a bunch of information about different locations and are preparing for a trip, you have to have a place to keep that information organized. Hopefully one that is easy to use on a desktop and has a mobile version as well. I’ve used Evernote for years, but after a recent (and fortunately only once) disaster where Evernote lost a note (for work) that I’d used to compile several hours of case analysis, I’ve decided to gravitate somewhat to OneNote and to use that for my desktop and mobile note compiling resource. With OneNote I can add links, make notes to myself and include clippings. Plus organization is much more structured visually than in Evernote, which makes things easier for me to find (yeah, ask me again in three years when I’ve got thousands of notes). But for now, OneNote is our trip note taking app.
Which brings us around to our main gps-mapping application, once the details get nailed down. This too needs to be a desktop with a companion mobile traveling app. Avenza maps is . . . while not totally unfunctional in Europe, is sorely lacking in the types of maps it provides for Europe and has made sufficient changes to its structure and approach since we last used it to seem a bit unfamiliar (why do companies that have an excellent software product feel compelled to “improve” it by making it harder to use?). Avenza made enough changes that Ann and I started looking for an alternative. We wound up with Gaia GPS. It too has a desktop version for trip planning as well as an off-line (both with cell coverage and downloadable outside cell coverage) mobile app. It, like Avenza maps, has a resource of geo-located maps based on paper versions (such as the excellent National Geographic maps) that you can use online and off-line.
It also provides some GPS functionality that has been a bit lacking in our usage so far - the InReach points are useful, but they too have changed their plans to make the downloading of points an expensive proposition. And we never used the InReach for GPS routing anyway. We’ll still keep the inReach for safety reasons, but we’ll be using Gaia GPS to track our routes (as we can with Alltrails, and could do with Avenza) and to do some route planning. At this point we’ve just decided on it, so we’ll hold final judgement on how good a tool it is until later. Hopefully, it will all work out and we won’t have to go app searching again.
We’ve also got a GPS system for the bimobil. It’s a Garmin 1090 MT-D designed for motor homes, which means you can enter in vehicle width, height and (in our case, very importantly) weight and the system will make sure it doesn’t send you down roads where you don’t fit. Again, we have not prepared massive trip planning with it yet, but we have used it locally and it hasn’t done us wrong yet (though it has let us know that, like all GPS devices it seems, it has oddities that don’t make sense to normal thinking people)!
Last there is Lightroom. Not that Lightroom is a planning application, but it gives us some options we didn’t have with Capture One for taking advantage of some of the tools discussed above. Lightroom has a Maps tab (it also has a Books tab that I’m thinking of checking out, but one thing at a time) that allows you to either automatically geolocate your photographs (if you have gps on your camera), or drag and drop images onto a map.
Unfortunately, the various camera companies don’t make that easy. A decade ago all companies talked about integrating GPS into cameras. They’ve stopped talking about it and the few that did at some point have now removed them. However, most camera companies have “apps” for their cameras. Like all apps, the first versions sucked, but (fingers crossed) they seem to be getting better. But they’re not perfect. The Leica Fotos app only allows geotagging from the phone to the camera when the app is fully controlling the camera - which means the camera needs to be on a tripod. Not helpful for geotagging images when you’re hand holding the camera. I’ve just downloaded a new, “improved” Fujifilm X app, which suggests that it will geotag the camera so long as it’s on when the camera is on and the two are connected. I need to test it out, but I think having a connection doesn’t interfere with the camera’s normal operation so I may be able to geotag images that way. Hopefully we will test that out over the coming days. If it works, Lightroom will automatically recognize the GPS EXIF data from my X-T5 images and place it on the map in Lightroom.
The alternative will be to use Lightroom Mobile. There, I’ll just take a photograph with my phone through the app whenever I’m making one on my camera. The Lightroom Mobile app will sync it over the cloud to Lightroom. When I import my camera images, the Mobile (phone) images will be already there and all I have to do is drag and drop the identical camera image to the same location. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. All we can do is test things and figure out a workable solution that I’ll actually use.
The last gear/sofware thing of note is an upgrade (if you want to call it that) to the bimobil. If you recall, we added a second spare tire to the bimobil because, when you go off road, the safe approach is to have a second spare. The first (normal spare) is on the underside of the vehicle towards the rear of the vehicle. Yeah, you have to crawl under the vehicle to get to the spare. The second was a bimobil add-on, which consists of a giant frame mounted at the rear of the cabin (tied into the vehicle’s truck frame), with a built in crane to lower the very, very heavy tire if ever needed.
Well, we started thinking and the fact is we really don’t need a second spare much of the time here in Europe (when we go to Iceland, yes, the spare will be there for the highlands, and if we ever make it to the US with the bimobil). So we’ve dismounted the spare (recommended for when we got the vehicle inspected and weighed to keep taxes down, yes, the tire is that heavy). Anyway, given it’s so much bigger than Beast was, and just driving it around is quite a bit more difficult, we thought about a bike mount for our e-bikes. That way we could run around smaller towns from our campground much easier. Our bike shop guy knows a guy (who Wim also knows) and now we have Johnny building us a custom bike rack to mount our e-bikes on the back of the bimobil. As Wim and Jasper put it, he’s a genius in figuring out how to construct things. Last Saturday when Ann and I were in the bimobil sorting some things out, Johnny stopped by with the base frame to see if he’d welded it all together right. It’s a frame that will mount to our existing frame through 4 bolt holes that already exist on the frame holding the tire. Johnny lifted up the frame and the bolt holes lined up perfectly. Yeah, he’s a genius. He discussed a few things with us (the cross members are ever so slightly lower than the side members . . . so a thin steel plate can be welded on top of the frame (yeah, more genius with a touch of design sense)). It’s going to look great, and Ann and I will have the option of setting up the bimobil for bikes or for a spare, and doing so only by removing a few bolts! Photos will follow once it gets mounted, probably some time in March.
Now, if you’ve stayed with us this far, you deserve a little reward. Insider information - Ann and I have started serious trip planning. We’ve got 2 Spring trips planned. We’re going to do a 1-week trip in March to Germany to explore the Kellerwald-Edersee National Park (as if you couldn’t tell from all the examples above). It has a lot of old and newer beech tree groves and will give us some topography we don’t quite get here. Also, it’s more of a test-run to see how living in the vehicle works out, but it should be good to get out for a week. Our other Spring trip is an April-May 3-week trip to southern Sweden. Depending on our planning, a bit of Norway may be thrown in there, but we don’t want to be on the road all the time and, face it, Norway will likely require a whole lot of driving to do it justice. It’s our first real expedition where we’ll be heading out for an extended period and we want to get a lot of photography done! We’re likely going to lay low for much of the summer with local, weekend trips, to keep our photography skills sharp and then start back up in the fall. Our friends John and Judy are heading over the pond in September and we will likely be joining them on a short excursion, and we have a week-long photography workshop with Joe Cornish in the UK booked in November (yes, the week of the election), which we’re trying to figure out if we can tack a longer vacation onto that trip (do I really want to drive the bimobil on the wrong side of the road for a month?).
As you can tell, we are in real planning mode, finally, and will hopefully have lots of fun stories and photographs to share! Thanks for joining us on the journey.