Originally Posted by
fiddlehead
Just finished a 783 mile hike in Eastern Europe and couldn't have done it without the phone.
There are no maps. Only an app and GPS track.
The Outdoor Active app is the ONLY way to tell (through past hiker's comments) where there might be water (and 1/4 of the time, the water was locked anyway, so we left comments for future hikers)
Google maps: To get a ride to a town for resupply, we google mapped a hotel, called them, and if they had vacancy, asked them to come and pick us up (the ones who had
There are no maps. Only an app and GPS track.
The app is the ONLY way to tell where there might be water (and 1/4 of the time, the water was locked anyway, so we left comments for future hikers)
To get a ride to a town for resupply, we google mapped a hotel, called them, and if they had vacancy, asked them to come and pick us up (the ones who had vacancies ALWAYS did)
Not only took photos, but a bunch of video too and now I'm working on a youtube vid about the amazing trip.
The compass app I downloaded was great and I used it quite a bit.
Flashlight: came in handy a few times although we were mostly always in bed when it got dark.
Google maps (to help figure out which town to resupply in (put it on satellite and you can even see coffee shops, pizza places, bars, etc.)
Google translate: Couldn't have communicated sometimes without it. Messenger: was great to show live vids to people we hiked with after they went home (and we were still out there). We figured out how to just speak into it and then hit a button and show our phrase to a local in each of the 4 different languages we encountered: Sovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Albanian, (Bosnia and Montenegro spoke mostly Croatian, except some old people who only spoke German or Russian (we knew a few words in those languages already, and hadn't downloaded them, so we were quite limited with those people)
Other (not so important things) we used it for
Sky map for stars,
Posted to instagram and FB from the trail (right before sleeping),
Airbnb (used it twice and weren't so happy with the results as the location wasn't as stated.
Recorder: every other day, we did an aprox 3 minute recording to remember things that we hope to put in a blog someday (since so few people have hiked the Via Dinarica, any info out there is a BIG help)
Called a taxi once with the phone. (but used it more for booking rooms, like I said above)
Figured out the bus schedules when we finished from Google (in Albania and got a bus to Kosovo) (there's only one mini-bus a day, so important to know the schedule)
Probably a few more, and calling my wife and son for free from my hotel room and doing free video chats for up to an hour sometimes was another biggie.
All in all, it made our hike possible, all in one device, that I kept in my pocket all the time (the trail disappears a lot, so it's important to have it handy)
Don't know how anyone could do this trail without it. (the trail is only 3 years old)