Everybody loves data

As Maura noted recently we've upgraded to phones that are a little more capable. I was certainly the holdout on that front, mostly because I wasn't able to convince myself the extra expense was worth it. That said, I've always wanted to have one when we go on road trips, so I could better navigate and check traffic conditions.

This weekend we went on our first family road trip (to Yosemite) in I don't know how long and it was a great opportunity to try out our new phones. Before we left, I enabled the Google Latitude feature on my phone, which basically tells the phone to send its location to Google, where it is saved and potentially shared with others. This let me create the map below - each marker is where we were at a point in time on the way there or the way back. You can drag the map around or zoom in to see more details.


View Larger Map

The whole trip took about five hours each way. The directions claimed it would take four, but they didn't account for the random stops one has to take for food, restrooms or barfing. In fact, if you could see the amount of time we spend at each marker, you'd see we had an interlude near Modesto while we had to clean up some unpleasantness on Megan's side of the car.

(some unpleasantness)