I was at the gym this afternoon with a colleague, and ended up thinking a lot about the Internet... and how it's completely changed the way we discover and share information, and generally learn. Afterward, I ended up thinking a bit about my recent European long weekend tour, and how the Internet, and the way we use it to share and search for information created a trip that wouldn't have been possible a few years ago.
So where do I start...
While my cousin and I were thinking about taking a trip for quite a while, we only ended up truly deciding on it the night before we went. On a random Thursday night we both sat around and talked about how we basically wanted to be boring old men, check into a hotel with a nice view, spend some time in the gym, and the rest catching up on sleep and reading. I know. I'm not *that* old yet either.
Anyway ... after trying Google, Lastminute and a number of other sites, we finally found the hotel by searching through reviews on Tripadvisor. We saw a bunch of pictures of the hotel (stunning) and great reviews as well. A quick trip to Expedia showed that we could get this 5-star hotel room for about £150 a night. Okay, so we were *almost* sold. The hotel was in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and we figured we should have a look at what the drive was going to look like.
We fired up Google Earth, got directions from London to St. Moritz, and after looking at some of the terrain we'd be driving through decided that we
had to do this drive!
We used a TomTom GPS (the Volvo XC90 we took for the weekend was incredibly comfortable, but didn't have the navigation option) to get directions during the trip, and so we never had to watch out for exits, turns, gas stations, etc... we let the GPS take care of us. No stressing or fussing with maps. It was fantastic.
Just before we arrived at the hotel we noticed that we had ascended to what we figured was a pretty high altitude. We stopped the truck, and I grabbed my Garmin GPS watch out of the back ... it turns out we were over 7-thousand feed above sea level. Cool!
After spending the first night in the hotel we woke up to see a fantastic view of the alps...
On seeing this in the morning, my cousin exclaimed "forget this old man stuff, we have to check out the alps!" ... and while I'd like to claim that I stood my ground and said we were going to stay put and relax, I agreed with him! But, surely we couldn't just look out at the alps... we had to see the
highest peak. Google searching for the highest peaks was somewhat useful... and the Wikipedia entries for the alps were somewhat useful... but then we stumbled upon a KML file that someone had created which had all the highest peaks of the alps labeled on it.
Again we fired up Google Earth, realized that the highest peak that was anywhere near us was in Italy, and plotted a quick route around the mountains. Of course, the fact that the Google-predicted route looked to have some amazing mountain vistas was the major selling point.
As we were getting ready to embark on the day's journey, it occurred to me "Hmm... this thing records the route I'm running, right... so... surely it'll let me record the route that we drive, right?" So off we went... and for the remainder of our trip (all the way back to London) we let the watch record our route.
When we got back to London, we showed my cousin's parents some of the pictures we took... and like all good nerds we did this by popping the MemoryStick's into the PlayStation 3, so we could see the pics on the hi-def screen. Then it occured to my cousin that I had my Mac with me, and we could plug my laptop into the TV...
So there we were, sitting in the living room, showing a Google Earth flyover of the route that we drove through the alps, the rest of Switzerland, up the autobahn (the speed graph was amusing here, of course ;-) and back through France.
It also occurred to us that the photographs have time-taken info in them... and we have GPS data that we could match up with it... My cousin's the programmer, so I'm leaving it to him to write something to crunch all the data together and show it off.
Anyway, somewhere in Italy it occurred to us that we'd never taken a vacation quite so rich and spontaneous. We visited lots of my favourite places in Paris, discovered and randomly tucked into cool little mountain towns in Italy and Switzerland, decided (against the GPS's suggestion) that the best way from Zurich to Paris involved going up A5 towards Offenburg, and swung by the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge in France, all before picking up some wine in Calais and heading back to London. All of this happened because we could use search to find data, plot it quickly against a kick-ass 3D map to see what it looked like, and plug some points into a GPS to get us there without worries... and then take all this crazy route data, recorded on a (admittedly large) wristwatch (!!!) and share an incredibly rich and detailed story of our trip with our friends.
What's got me wondering is ... well, clearly we're alpha geeks ... normal people don't do this... but while my aunt and uncle thought the whole Google Earth flythrough was pretty cool, they didn't react as though it was some insanely magical creation... it was interesting, but not wholly unexpected. So how's planning your vacation going to change in three years, when
everyone does this? Will we eventually expect that everything's going to be geo-tagged and searchable? Will we just assume this sort of context will be normal? I wouldn't bet against it... and I'm curious to see just what else is going to change.
