New York

10.7.08

TripCart

Fathers are worth keeping around, if only because they're excellent at obsessively organizing travel plans so their family'll have fun vacations in the most efficient manner possible, goddammit. If you lack your own A-type patriarch, borrow one from Tripcart.

NY-based Cart's an ultra-informative GMap-based travel planner that helps you discover and meticulously organize a ridiculous amount of info, relegating your dog-eared travel books to gifts for people you never want to see again. Simply select a region/city on the U.S. map, then drill further down by browsing user-suggested attractions and local tag cloud guides (About the Region, Things to Do...); or, populate a GMap with attractions by selecting from the available features, e.g., popular hotels, shopping centers, historic sites, and, oddly, rock-climbing walls (what, no petanque?). Click the attractions for contact info & useful contextual details (hotel rates and links to reservations, nearby places of interest...), plus the option of adding the attraction to your itinerary; Cart'll then provide a date-sortable itinerary complete w/ venue contact information, a field for your personal notes, even a field specifically for confirmation numbers (like condoms, never needed unless asked for).

For the obsessive yet lazy, Cart'll also let you view other users' planned trips and copy them -- just like dad used to do, 'cause he'd be damned if the Joneses's kids were the only ones on the block to see the Painted Desert. Damned.

Plan your next trip at TripCart.com