Plan me a Trip: Build a Route Around Any Area

What is Plan me a Trip?

Plan me a Trip is where all of RoadTrippin's features come together. Instead of planning a drive in one place and stops in another, you pick any combination of stop categories and the app builds one complete route through all of them around a destination area.

It's designed for trips where you want to do a little of everything — find a geocache, walk a trail, check out a museum, and visit a historic site, all in one outing. It works especially well for day trips: enter your home city, select everything, and see what's around you.

Building your trip

1. Open the Plan me a Trip tab (🧭).
2. Under Where do you want to explore?, type a city, address, or landmark — or tap the 📍 button to use your current location.
3. Pick a search radius and a travel mode, then tap the category buttons to choose what to include: 📦 Geocaches, 🌲 Parks, 🏛️ Museums, 🏚️ Historic Sites, 🌄 Viewpoints, and 🥾 Trailheads. Any combination works, and active categories are highlighted.
4. Tap Plan My Trip. The app searches for real places in each selected category and opens the map with everything it found.
5. Tap a stop on the map, then + Add to Route for each one you want. When you're ready, tap Plan Route at the bottom of the stop list.
6. The full path through your stops is drawn on the map. Tap the trip pill in the corner for distance, drive time, and stop count, plus Directions, a GPX file, Google Maps or Apple Maps, and Save This Trip.

Prefer a list to a map? Close the map and use the checklist in the tab to pick your stops, then tap Build Route — the map opens with the path drawn the same way.

Choosing a travel mode

• Drive — routes on roads and also marks parking near each stop, labeled FREE, PAID, or ? when the fee isn't known.
• Walk — routes on footpaths, which is ideal for exploring a downtown or a large park on foot.
• Transit — best paired with Google Maps or Apple Maps, which can fill in the bus and train connections between your stops.

The route is ordered for the shortest overall distance from your starting area, so you can add stops in any order.

Reading the map

Every category gets its own marker color so you can tell at a glance what each stop is:

• Brown and gold — geocaches
• Green — parks and nature areas
• Amber — museums and cultural sites
• Blue-gray — historic sites and landmarks
• Teal — viewpoints and scenic overlooks
• Orange — trailheads
• Blue line — the route connecting all of your stops, with numbered circles showing the driving order

Tap any marker to see the stop's name and category.

Tips for better results

• Plan me a Trip works best in or near larger cities, where every category has good OpenStreetMap coverage.
• If a category returns nothing, try a larger radius, a bigger nearby city, or turn that category off.
• Geocache results depend on what's been tagged in OpenStreetMap, so some areas return few or none — see the Geocache guide for why.
• Save as many trips as you like and revisit them any time from My Account.