Overland Journal

Navigating Adventure

As travelers, we embrace the serendipity and randomness of travel, the paper map unfurled on a dusty hood, each direction yielding a wonder. There are also times when we get two flats in one day and just really, really want to find a campsite. Planning and technology can complement adventure, even if our romantic ideals of exploration spurns visions of the Luddite’s journey. There are tools available today that make overlanding safer and more connected than ever before, allowing us to plug in while we unplug. In the end, these apps are tools, and we can always eschew those conveniences if we choose.

NAVIGATION

The most useful of the programs are navigation applications, which allow physical progress (via GPS) to be rendered over a map layer, shown alongside XML data like waypoints, tracks, and POIs. What started as simple topographical applications that displayed 7.5-minute scanned and rastered paper maps on an iPhone 10 years ago (Topo Maps app) has now grown to feature-rich navigation and planning tools with base layers from both open and curated sources. Most importantly, they have started to become reliable for track recording, which, in our experience, has been buggy at best, or an utter failure at worst. As a result, we still bring a traditional Garmin GPS to ensure our route is securely saved.

NAVIGATION APPS FALL INTO THREE CATEGORIES It is easy to dismiss the most popular (and even native) applications like Google Maps, Google Earth, Apple Maps, and Waze, but they are widely used for compelling reasons. Most notably, their access to user data that helps indicate traffic patterns,

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