Route Planner

Planning our 2 Year road trip around the US

As my wife and I began planning our epic 2 year road trip around the United States, I realized I needed a better way to organize and visualize our route. That's why I decided to create my own custom web app, which I'm calling the "Route Planner".

The Inspiration Behind the Route Planner

The inspiration for this app came directly from our travel planning needs. We've been dreaming of this cross-country road trip since 2020 (and kicked it off in July 2023). Our main goals are to explore as much of this vast country as possible, while also trying to avoid the super cold winter weather.

So I set out to build a tool that would allow us to plot our route, see the average climate conditions for each potential stop, and easily adjust our plans as needed. Having this kind of visual planning tool has been invaluable as we navigate coordinating our 2 year itinerary.

Key Features of the Route Planner

The Route Planner has a few key features that make it uniquely suited for our road trip planning needs:

  • Route Planning: The core functionality allows us to map out a travel route across the U.S., adding stops along the way.
  • Climate Data: When adding a stop, we can select the month we want to be there and the app will display the average max/average/min temperatures and precipitation for that location and time.
  • Drive Time Calculations: We can also calculate the estimated drive time between stops to help us plan our daily mileage.
  • Flexible Scheduling: The app automatically increments the month as we add more stops, but this is configurable based on how quickly we plan to move.
  • Shareable Plans: We can share the link to our trip plan with friends and family so they can view our route.

The Development Process

As someone transitioning from a Data Science background into Software Engineering, building this app was a bit of a learning experience for me. I initially started with the R programming language and Shiny framework, since that was a tool I was already familiar with.

However, as I've been developing my skills as a full-stack engineer, I've realized I'd love to rebuild this app using JavaScript in the future. The front-end development aspect is an area I'm still working to improve, but projects like this are great practice.

The development process has been an iterative one, where I've added new features based on my own and my wife's experiences using the app. For example, I noticed that sometimes we'd be moving quickly between stops in the same month, while other times we'd be staying in one place for a full month. So I added the ability to configure how many stops should be added before the month auto increments.

Looking Ahead

So far, besides myself, the only real user of the Route Planner has been my wife, who has been an invaluable beta tester. She's provided great feedback and helped me prioritize which features to build out next.

At the moment, I consider the Trip Planner app to be "done" as I feel it's now serving our needs quite well. However, I am considering building a companion app that would display our actual route using GPS data and provide various trip metrics once we're done. I've created a basic prototype of that in R Shiny, but I'd like to rebuild it from scratch using JavaScript as a learning exercise.

In the meantime, I'm also working on another personal project - a "Book Club Wrapped" app that will help analyze and visualize the reading habits of my book club. But the Route Planner will always hold a special place in my heart, as it's been an incredibly rewarding experience to create a tool that's directly solving a problem I'm facing in my own life.

Written with the assistance of perplexity.ai.