Over the years we’ve had a lot of offers to connect with people as we’ve traveled and we’ve never done a great job at managing those. We’ve fixed that.
There was the older RVer we parked next to in Scottsdale, AZ. He gave us fresh-picked oranges from his sister’s house and a card with his address in Albuquerque. He had a spot with full hookups we could come and use any time.
Except by the time we got to Albuquerque, we had lost that card.
Then there was the couple we met in Port Angeles, Washington who were from Maryland.
Stop by and look us up when you are in our neck of the woods!
We’ve now been through the Land of Marys a couple times. Do you think we could find their information again?
No App?
This has long bugged me. There should be an App. I’ve played with a couple that looked promising but they were overkill.
I tried a private Google map with a set of waypoints but it just seemed to take too long to access and update.
The solution was staring me in the face.
ExpressionEngine Saves the Day!
Ditching Suburbia runs on ExpressionEngine. We are already geocoding our travel blog entries - each one has a “Map It” link so you can see the location on a Google map.
We also have a master map with all of our travel blogs pinned on it (Hm - I don’t think I formally announced that either - check it out!).
Anyway - a quick little bit of EE development on the backend and we have a place to record those meetup requests (and other points of interest) for future route planning. By geocoding each meetup request we can plot them all on a private Google map and see who is close to whom.
Reader Submissions Now Accepted
Even better - a little more programming and now we have a way for you to submit a Meetup Request.
Just tell us who you are, how to contact you, and find your location on the provided map.. You’ll be entered into our database of waypoints that we will consult while planning our routes.
Don’t worry about your privacy - we’ll never share it publicly and EE has a great security track record.
Let us know where you are!