I've been trying to cool it a bit this month, with the obsessing about the trip. It was making the summer go by dreadfully slow. But I'm afraid I've fallen right back into it.
A few things I've discovered recently:
Pinterest is useful for planning trips. I never got the point of it before, but I kept finding links to great articles on there. So, I signed up and I get it now.
There are all kinds of apps that do useful things, too, but no one app does everything.
The Tube Map app lets you save your favorite routes and gives you updates about service. And if you want to pay money, it'll also tell you which carriage of each train is nearest the way out to save you time, and it'll tell you when the last train is for all of the stations. I haven't paid money for that, though. I don't think I'll be in that big of a hurry, and the time tables are free to download, which I have. The best part is it overlays the walking time between stations over the tube map, so I don't end up wasting my time and money, when I could just walk five minutes to get to another station. Oh, and it works offline.
The Ulmon London app lets you put pins in a map of all the places you want to remember for various reasons. I've starred everything from the Tower of London to the Tesco nearest my hotel. It gives you information about the popular ones and shows you the nearby tube stations. And it works offline. It doesn't, however, offer an itinerary planner. But I like it because it seems like more places show up on its map.
I was a schmuck and paid way too much for the Trip Boss app, while half asleep. Don't buy apps in bed! TripIt! or Tripomatic both do the same thing and look better and work better. They let you plan out itineraries for your trip. The one downside of Tripomatic is it offers to give you directions from place to place on your itinerary, but it doesn't offer the tube as a travel option. I gave up playing with TripIt! because it's ugly and didn't recognize so many places I wanted to go. Trip Case is similar, but it doesn't work offline. It looks good, but it's confusing and doesn't really do much. Tripomatic also has some travel guide features and lists tours and day trips, so point goes to Tripomatic for itinerary planning.
Triposo is an offline-enabled travel guide, basically. It also lets you book tours and day trips from within the app. The coolest thing is it has audio guided walking tours available on the app. Also, the mini guides created by community members are nice. It seems more geared toward booking things, rather than planning the details of an already booked trip, though, which is what I'm looking for now.
I also downloaded a packing list app and a mobile data manager to help keep me from going over while I'm in London and much more limited data-wise than at home.
My intention was to plan out each day, so I'm sure to not miss anything. But that seems pretty unrealistic, now that I'm getting down to it. So, for right now, I'm narrowing down the list of what I must do, what I kind of want to do, and what I only want to do if bored. I'm plotting out the things I've already booked, and I'll add things in as I make restaurant reservations and such. The rest might just have to be filled in a day ahead or something. Maybe I'll sit in the pub and make plans each evening.
Oh, yeah, by the way--my hotel is above London's oldest gay pub! I found that out this week. It's also haunted. So, I totally picked the right place for me.
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