Step by step for every module in the suite – written from the actual screens and flows, not a generic description.
Travel Guide
Travel Guide is for when you roughly know what you're longing for but not exactly where to go. It builds the trip together with you, one leg at a time.
Set the frame
Open the Travel Guide tab in the app.
Choose how the trip is steered: a compass direction (north, south, east, west from your starting point) or a specific country to explore.
Tick the themes you're after – Coast & swimming, Mountains & views, Forest & nature, History & culture, Active & family, City & shopping, or Quiet & remote. You can combine several.
Enter a starting point, an optional fixed destination, whether it should be a round trip, and the distance between sights in kilometres.
Press Start Travel Guide.
Choose one leg at a time
Travel Guide searches for verified places and drops them as pins on the map. The search takes a moment – the app tells you how long it took once it's done.
Click a pin to open the candidate card: photo, description, distance, an approximate number of days, an estimated cost, and which of your themes the place matched.
Confirm destination adds the leg. The app then totals the trip so far – confirmed days, kilometres and cost.
New candidates fan out from the place you just chose. Keep going as long as you want to build further.
Time to head home finishes the loop.
Hand over to the route planner
Add to the route planner moves the whole destination list across. The app says so itself: Travel Guide has filled in the destination list, and the route planner does the exact maths when you press Calculate route.
You never have to copy anything by hand.
Worth knowing
The numbers Travel Guide shows along the way are estimates, there to help you choose between two candidates. The route planner works out the real ones.
If Travel Guide finds no verified places it says so plainly and shows approximate compass pins instead – it doesn't pretend.
Travel Guide is a premium feature: it needs Google Places to judge what is worth seeing, and therefore requires your own Google key. Without one, the route planner works as usual on the free tier.
Route Planner
Route Planner is the suite's core: daily stages, vehicles and automatic stops in one workspace.
Planning your first trip
Open the Route Planner tab (open by default).
Add destinations and any waypoints on the map or through the search field.
Open Trip Profile → Vehicles and pick or create a vehicle: diesel, EV or motorhome, with consumption and range.
Under Settings, set start time, end time, maximum driving per day, breaks, lunch and search precision.
Calculate the route. The itinerary fills in with daily stages, driving times and automatically suggested stops for lunch, rest, fuel or charging, and overnight.
How the app chooses stops for you
Route Planner searches in a set order: first Trafikverket, then WB Open Places, last Google (if you have premium). A stop that already satisfies your trip rules is chosen automatically; you can always adjust or move it manually in the itinerary table.
Filtering the map
The map toolbar has chip filters for Waypoints, Overnight, Lunch, Rest, Fuel/Charging – toggle what you want to see. ⛶ Whole route zooms to the entire trip, and the day filter on the side lets you focus on a single day.
Sending the trip onward
Under System you'll find export: share the trip as a story (opens Happy Trails), share the project with someone else, import a project, export to Excel, open in Google Maps, or export to Google My Maps.
Worth knowing
The free tier needs no Google key at all – route, geocoding and images all come from open sources.
A saved setting sticks until you change it yourself, even if a later update changes the default value.
On The Road (the mobile surface)
Once you're actually moving, the app changes shape: six simple surfaces instead of the planning toolkit.
The six surfaces
🚌 Trip – the same itinerary as on the desktop, in mobile form.
🧭 Now – the next stop and the rest of the day. The day stepper (◀ ▶) lets you browse between days, and Use my location shows where you actually are on the route.
🗺️ Map – the map view, built for one-handed use.
📍 Nearby – tap Nearby for a list of places close by, sorted by distance.
🏅 Quests – the trip's badges of honour: four categories of quest to tick off along the way.
⋯ More – your travel profile, system settings and sign-in.
How the app knows where you are
Position is worked out from the route's own geometry once you share your location – no extra server round-trip needed. Works even if you're just along for the ride without having planned the trip yourself.
Worth knowing
No login is required to follow a shared trip.
The weather forecast only lives here, not in the planning view – it's irrelevant until you're actually on the road.
Something gone wrong? System menu → 🧭 Route Diagnostics → Copy diagnostics gives you a short, shareable report instead of having to describe the problem in words.
Android Auto
The same travel companion, on the car's own screen — but only to look, not to plan.
Before you drive
Sign in on the phone app with your Google account (sign-in always happens on the phone, never on the car screen).
Approve location permission when the phone asks.
Plan the trip in advance on desktop or mobile – Android Auto reads a trip that already exists, it never creates one of its own.
On the car screen
Next stop shows the heading "NEXT STOP" once a position has been worked out, otherwise "FIRST STOP OF THE TRIP · no position yet" – the app never hides what it doesn't know.
My trips lists your saved trips; pick one to switch.
What do you need? gives four large buttons – toilet, food, sleep, fuel/charge – adapted to your vehicle.
X nearby lists real places close by with distance and source. Tap a place to navigate there using the car's own navigation.
Worth knowing
The app never draws its own map and never plans a route – it hands you off to the car's built-in navigation.
Right now the app is built and tested but not yet published on Google Play — a deliberate timing choice, not a technical blocker.
Explorer
Perfect for the wait at a rest stop — or just for exploring wherever you happen to be.
Choose your starting point: the default location or Use my location.
Press Start exploring.
How it works
The van drives automatically along a winding road. At every junction you get a few seconds to choose left, straight ahead, or right. Left and right lead to a real, nearby place – with a name, category, photo and short description where one exists – added to your finds. Straight ahead costs nothing but finds nothing either.
Keep an eye on your three gauges: range, hunger, and toilet need. Visiting a place tops up the right gauge or scores points, depending on what kind of stop it is.
Worth knowing
Every place is real, pulled from WB Open Places – nothing is invented.
Photos and descriptions come from Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, always credited.
Coverage is strongest in the Nordics. Outside the Nordics, food and rest finds can be sparser.
Nothing is saved between sessions – every round starts fresh.
Car Bingo
Give the back seat something better to do than stare at a screen.
Agree on a shared seed (any text, e.g. "yellow-moose-42") – or let the app roll a random one. Everyone using the same seed and board gets the same 16 tiles.
Enter your name and pick a board (the default board or a shared custom one).
Tap a tile when you spot it. Four in a row – row, column or diagonal – triggers a small celebration.
Creating and sharing your own board
Press ➕ Create your own board to swap any tiles for your own subjects, set your own points, and share the board with the rest of the car via a 🔗 Share code. Works without a connection too – it falls back to a long import link that works over something like AirDrop.
Worth knowing
No syncing is needed between phones during play – everything is saved locally on each phone, so it keeps working offline once a board exists.
Light and dark mode follow the phone's own setting automatically.
Reset my board clears your marks; Switch seed/player takes you back to the start screen.
Quests
Honor badges for the detour you took anyway — no proof required.
Getting started
Open the 🏅 Quests tab in the mobile app (On The Road), the sixth tab next to Now, Map and Nearby.
Browse the quests, grouped into four categories (below). The counter at the top shows how many of twelve badges you've taken.
Did you pull one off? Tap I did it! ✅, and optionally add a short note about what happened.
The four categories
Detours & spontaneity – The Long Way Round (pick a route at least 20 minutes slower that goes somewhere prettier), Chance's Route (let the passenger or a die decide at the next junction).
Cabin life & travel culture – The Analogue Fifty (50 km with every screen switched off), The Border Tradition (a fixed ritual every time you cross a county or country line), Night Rollers.
Local immersion – The Chain Breaker (a local bakery or roadside inn instead of a chain), Local Counsel (ask a local for their favourite spot within 15 minutes), The Craft Hunter.
Micro-adventure & nature – The Spontaneous Swim, The Night Owl (stop after dark somewhere with no street lighting and watch the stars for ten minutes), The Viewpoint.
How it works
There's no geofencing and no photo to upload – honor is the entire mechanism. Completed quests collect as badges in your profile, with a date. A badge can be deactivated but is never deleted by mistake; an attempt to delete an earned badge is turned down with an explanation.
Worth knowing
The catalogue (twelve quests currently) is only edited by the product owner, not by you as a traveller – that's what keeps it surprising and curated.
Quests are a deliberate exception in the suite: the only curiosity that gets its own visible space in the mobile app instead of being tucked into a menu.
Open Places
The catalogue underneath everything else — and the only module you can visit fully standalone from the rest of the suite.
The map opens on a Europe-wide overview; allow location permission to pan to yourself automatically.
Zoom in to go from clustered numbers to individual places with name, category and facilities.
Filter with the chips along the top: Camping, On the road, Fuel, Sights, Facilities.
Already have a planned route (from Route Planner or Google My Maps)? Import it as a KML file to see rest stops along your specific road.
You'll rarely land here directly
Most people meet Open Places without knowing it – it powers stop search behind the scenes in both Route Planner and Explorer. The standalone map is here for anyone who wants to explore the catalogue itself, or check why a particular stop was suggested.
Worth knowing
690,000+ places, with full coverage (including food and churches) across the Nordics and a lighter profile across the rest of Europe.
A missing fact like a toilet usually means "not yet surveyed," not "doesn't exist" – check on the ground if it matters.
Your trip, seen in the rearview mirror — without you having written or photographed a thing along the way.
Sharing your trip
After the trip, open System → 📖 Share the trip as a story.
Enter the date you got in the car – the only thing the app actually asks.
Pick a narrative voice: The Logbook (matter-of-fact, diary tone), The Salt-Sprayed Pirate (colourful, nautical the whole way through), or The Deadpan Bureaucrat (dry and formal). The voice belongs to this particular share, not a persistent app setting.
Publish. You get a public link shaped like `/resa/<code>` to share with family and friends – no account needed to open it.
What the reader sees
A car driving your route across the map, with speech bubbles at each stop – day, place, and a short line quoting the place's own description (from Wikivoyage or Wikipedia) but never overselling it. Changes you made along the way, like a spontaneous detour, show up in the story as their own moment.
Worth knowing
No text or photos of your own are required – just the choices you actually made during the trip.
The link reveals where you stayed overnight. Think about who you share it with.
You can withdraw a published story whenever you want – the button is Stop sharing.
The story ends with a Sources block crediting where the map, route, places, images and place descriptions came from, with licences. It travels with every shared link without you doing anything.
