Rick Steves Audio Europe App Review

I am a big fan of using audio for learning experiences. As an instructional designer I understand the efficacy of this approach and as a tourist I appreciate its convenience. So when our friends, who were with us for part of the recent Europe trip, introduced us to the Rick Steves Audio Europe App I jumped at it. Being able to stay visually engaged with a place while getting audio information about it allows a greater appreciation than trying to look back and forth between info plaques and the thing you are suppose to be seeing. In addition to the inconvenience of trying to look between an object or scene and a plaque, in many places there will not be plaques in English or even plaques at all. This is particularly true of places like gardens and churches. For these reasons I found the Rick Steves app to be extremely valuable while traveling in Europe.

Rick Steves is an American who is an expert on European travel. He has written numerous guide books and also runs his own tours. His audio guides are very informative and tell you just where to look and what you are looking at. Of course we all know, much to my chagrin, that you can't learn everything about a place when you visit it, and Rick does a good job of condensing down the information and sharing a good amount with you.

The key to using the app is to be patient with it. It's far from perfect as an app and of course there is no way for Rick to know what might be going on when you are at any particular location in Europe. Despite its failings the information is very useful and I found myself wishing that I had Rick Steves' audio guides for many places where there wasn't one available.

If you decide to use this app while you are traveling in Europe I highly recommend that you download everything you need before you leave your own internet, as I do with most apps you use for traveling. Download anything that you think might need, it is far better to have some audio that you don't listen to than not have one downloaded that you end up wanting. I would recommend downloading everything available for each city you are visiting and double check that it actually downloaded.

One of the problems is that you can't always tell if a certain location have an audio guide available because some places are hidden inside of larger guides. For example we did not think that there was one for Notre Dame until we downloaded the Paris walking tour guide and found that it had its own tracks. Since you can't see the individual tracks until you download the guide its hard to know which ones you are going to need. It's not the best user experience, but the content is good.

Speaking of the user experience I'll just point out a few things that are likely to be frustrating so you are prepared for them. The first is non-standard audio controls, this just means that it doesn't use the iPhone's regular audio controls so that when you turn on your phone's lock screen you can't use options like the 15 second skip back and forward controls. The second is the maps, in every guide Rick will tell you there is a map available, these are just simple PDFs which might be helpful in a pinch, but you are probably better off getting a map from the info desk of whatever location you are visiting.

One issue that we encountered was trying to all stay in the same place on each guide. In hindsight my suggestion is to not worry much about it, if you start at the same time then you are mostly going to be near each other. I also highly suggest using headphones with a play/pause button so that you can easily stop the audio when needed and then start it again without having to dig out your phone. As way of a word of caution to Android users, it appears the Android version of the app does not allow for playback at double speed.

Aside from the audio guides to specific places that are in the app Rick also has a number of interviews he has done with experts on a particular location. These can be good to listen to when you are traveling to or from a place to give you more context and understanding, but if you have a limited amount of storage on your device definitely prioritize the actual audio guides.

In summary this app really is a must have for visiting Europe. Even though many of the places you go might offer audio guides of their own they are normally harder to understand and require an extra purchase whereas this app is free, so you should use it wherever you can.

Four Apps for Traveling in Europe

Even though we did not have any cell service while we were in Europe and only had intermittent wifi access, I still relied heavily on mobile apps to help with our experience while were there. In this post I'll talk about some of the most useful ones.

Since internet at European hotels and hotspots is not always reliable it is best if you can download and prepare these apps before you leave home. Always open an app after you download it to make sure that any further downloads of maps or information is complete. This is also useful in making sure that the app actually works before you need it.

Google Translate:

If there is only one app that you make sure you download and prepare before leaving make it this one. Unless you are fluent in the languages of all the countries you plan on visiting this will be an extremely useful app for you. You can of course put in a phrase and have it translated into the language of your choice, but since I have a very hard time with pronunciation I don't find this particularly useful. What I do find awesome about this app is the camera feature which allows you to point the camera at any text and have it translated, in the picture, to the language of your choice. 

This is extremely useful if you are in a country or area of a country that is less English friendly. You can simply point your phone's camera a the sign and get a (sometimes rough) translation of it. Even though these are not perfect translations they are good enough to help you figure out the way you need to go. 

The key is to make sure that you have each language you will need downloaded into your device before leaving the internet. Not every language is available for download but most of the major ones are and they are adding more with each update. 

Rick Steves Audio Europe:

You can get audio guides at a lot of European locations, but they normally cost extra and have a robotic monotone translation voice. That's not bad, but the Rick Steves app is free and Rick is a native English speaker, even if his jokes aren't that funny. You can learn a lot from Rick but he doesn't completely overwhelm you.

We highly suggest using Rick Steve's audio Europe in the places he has audio tours available. Make sure that you download all the guides for places you are going to visit before you go. Be aware that some places (like Notre Dame in Paris) don't have there own guides but are included in walking tour guides for an entire area.

Lonely Planet:

This is one of the most popular travel apps in the last year and with good reason, it is a clean looking app that is easy to use. The app will give you lots of information on specific cities, unfortunately a lot of cities, even major ones, haven't been added yet, but I know that more are coming. I used it when we were in Paris and Venice.

Each city guide contains a map that will show your GPS location and points of interest in the city. You can filter these by different categories, and when you click on one you can find useful information about it. When Rick Steves guide wasn't available I often used this app to get a good English overview of site.

Google Maps:

This one probably seems like a no-brainer to some of you, but I know there are still a lot of people that don't realize they can download offline maps from Google Maps. This means that even if you don't have data available it will still be a very useful app as long as you remember to download them before you go.

Simply go to the area you want to download on the map, zoom out to the appropriate level, tap on the menu icon and choose "Offline Areas". You can then tap the blue + icon to add download the area. While offline you won't be able to get turn by turn directions but you will be able to view the map and find you way. 

Guide to Riding the Paris Metro

My first introduction to Paris was in the back of a shuttle van from the Orly airport to our hotel. And what I saw made me absolutely certain that I never wanted to drive a car in Paris. Fortunately for the average tourist there is no reason to drive through the city of the Paris; the public transportation system is excellent and will serve to get you wherever you are going.

While the metro system can get you anywhere in the city that also means it is quite large and can be confusing to new visitors, particularly if like me you don't know French. There are subways, rail lines, and busses, all with different colors and numbers making confusing transfers and crossing 5 zones.

There are two keys to successfully riding the Paris metro as a tourist, the first is to get the right tickets for your trip and the second is to use the metro app if you have a smartphone. Note that you can use the app even if you do not have a cellular connection while you are in France.

Tickets:

The first thing to do is make sure that you get the right tickets for what you will be doing in Paris. In order to do this you will need to know how long you are staying for and what sites you are going to visit. The best option for most tourists will be the Paris Visite pass. These passes come in options of 1, 2, 3, or 5 days for either Zones 1-3 or Zones 1-5. The pass will give you unlimited rides on the entire metro system for the designated number of days and zones you choose.

For example, when we were there we knew we would be touring for 3 days and that we would want to see the sites in the main area of the city and get back and fourth to our hotel, this would involve travel in Zones 1-3, but we also know that we wanted to go visit Versailles on one of the days which meant we would need to travel to zone 5. So we got the Paris Visite 3 day pass for zones 1-5.

Purchasing Tickets:

There is supposed to be a way to purchase tickets online but I am not sure where you pick them up if you do that. Most people purchase tickets from a tickets machine in the metro stations. Be aware when using the machines that if you don't speak French you will need to use a machine that lets you choose the language. These will normally be marked with a British flag on them. Once you have a machine you can understand getting the tickets is a fairly simple process of following the on screen directions.

Warning: the ticket machine we used would not take our Visa cards, we don't know why but we had to use cash Euros to finally get our passes. So even if you plan to use a card to purchase them make sure you have enough cash on hand to purchase them if needed. At least at our station the people at the window could not sell tickets so the machine was the only way.

When you do get your tickets you will find that they are very small, just about half an inch wide. We were really worried that we would lose them, but fortunately we didn't. You only need them when entering a metro station or getting on a bus, not when exiting or getting off. Keep them someplace safe when you are not using them.

The App:

You could try the figure out your own route through the city using just the Paris Metro maps in every station and at every stop, but that would be a huge hassle when you can just use the free NextStopParis app provided by the RATP which is the transit authority. The app is not perfect, but as far as transit apps go it is pretty well put together.

Make sure that you download the app before you get to Paris. This is especially true if you are not going to have cell service while you are in Paris, but is good practice even if you are. Once you have the app downloaded on your phone make sure you open it so that it can download the offline maps for you.

In the app you will most often use the option at the top of the main screen to get direction to a specific location. All of the main tourist attractions are in the app, if you need to get somewhere else such as a restaurant or hotel it is easiest to just find out which metro stop is nearest to it and navigate to that.

If you are planning your days and you want to know how to get from one spot to another, or if your GPS is not working, you can hit the plus sign below the destination bar to get the full options.

Other Things to Know:

• The Paris metro, like all metros, gets very crowded when people are going or coming from work, or if there is a major sporting event. If you don't like to stand close to people try to avoid riding the metro at these times.
• Also like most metros the Paris trains are home to pick pockets so stay aware of your surroundings and secure your belongings while riding.
• In metro stations where several lines meet you should follow the numbered colored circles for the train you are transferring to, these will be on signs above your head. In some stations there will also be footprints on the ground in the color of the different trains.
• Be aware that a down arrow means straight in France, this took me a lot of getting use to.
• Always make sure you know where the line you are looking for terminates in the direction you are going because you will need that information to know which side of the tracks you should be on.

Chimani Releases 59 New National Park Apps

Whenever I talk with someone about going to visit a National Park these days I always recommend that they check and see if there is Chimani smartphone app available for where they are visiting. Chimani apps have been extremely helpful to us in the last year while visiting the Grand Canyon, Arches, and Canyonlands National Parks.

Yesterday (June 1st, 2016) Chimani released apps for the parks that they had not completed yet, meaning that there is now a Chimani app to guide you through each of the U.S. National Parks. This is an impressive feat and the folks over at Chimani asked us here at Yellow Van Travels to help get the word out about it.

Chimani was only able to produce these apps so quickly because of generous support from Subaru of America. Now I have never had a Subaru, so I can't speak to what kind of cars they are, but I can say this is a worthy cause for them to invest resources into.

I have not looked at all 59 of the apps that Chimani has for National Parks, but the ones I have looked at all appear to run very similarly. This is great because it means you only have to get use to the interface once and then as you travel across America to the different parks it will remain mostly consistent, although some parks will have different features or categories depending on what the park has available.

One of the biggest advantages of Chimani apps is that they can be used without an internet connection as long as you download the map data before leaving the internet. This is extremely helpful since, as you adventures know, cell service in the parks is almost always spotty at best.

Another big reason these apps have been developed is to try and reduce waste in National Parks. The paper guides that the parks have traditionally given out often end up in landfills, or worse as litter. Some parks, like the Grand Canyon, have even stopped giving guides out recently. So be sure before you go to a National Park that you download the corresponding Chimani app and get the correct data downloaded on it, then you can make your trip a little easier, give the environment a little boost, and have yourself an adventure.

Chimani Arches and Canyonlands National Parks Apps Review

As you have probably noticed we had a fantastic time down in Moab visiting both Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. The area is absolutely amazing and full of beautiful places and natural wonders. There is so much to do though that it can be a little overwhelming, so for both parks I used the respective Chimani apps to help plan and carry out our adventures. I used the apps on a iPhone running iOS 9, but they are also available for Android.

These apps function very similarly to the Chimani Grand Canyon app that I reviewed a while ago, but it was my first time using the new interface that they updated too. And I have to say that it worked ok, but not as well as I was hoping. The new interface looks nice, but finding what I wanted wasn't always simple, more on that in a minute.

The Arches app and Canyonlands app are almost identical in form and function, only the specific information is different, so I will treat them as one thing for the sake of this review.

App Organization 

When you open the app you will be presented with a menu screen like the one shown below.

 There are a bunch of different categories to help you out so it is suppose to be easy to find what you want to do. Unfortunately I was not always sure where different activities would show up, for example the line between auto touring and hiking is very blurred with some of the same locations showing up in both places. That confused me for a bit, but I guess it makes sense if it is an attraction that can both be hiked to and seen from a pullout or parking lot. If you are not sure what category a particular attraction or activity might be found under chances are that it is under multiple.You can also use the search feature if you want to find something specific.

The menu grid is easy to navigate, although all the topics can also be found in list form under the side menu. One thing I wish though is that you could arrange the sections in the order that you most use them. For example the tab trip planning was not something I used, so if I could have replaced it with the hiking tab that would have been more useful to have at the top of the screen. 

Planning Your Trip

These apps are very useful in planning your trip to the parks because they will tell you how difficult the hikes are and about how long to expect on each. There is a section of the app called "Trip Planning" but I did not find this to be useful at all. It doesn't really help you to figure out what you want, so I would avoid it.

The best thing to do is just go look at the sections of things you like to do, in the case of these apps mostly hiking. When you find an activity that you want to do on your trip, or might want to do, just bookmark it by tapping the bookmark in the upper right hand corner of the details screen.

Now I'll do you a favor and tell you where to find those bookmarks later, since it is not apparent from the app itself, in fact I did not figure it out until after we had already come home from Moab. From the Home screen tap the banner at the very top, the one that says the name of the park and shows your rank (normally scout). This will take you the "My Chimani" section of the app where one of the sections is "bookmarks." This will make your trip much easier. Simply bookmark the activities that you want to do and then you will be able to easily find them while you are in the parks. This will prove useful when using the maps as well. 

Maps in the App

When using the app on are trip I thought the map portion of the app was virtually useless because it looked like this just a couple big orange circles and numbers.

You have to zoom in for individual places to appear and when you do you are so close that you can't see it in relation to anything else.

For this reason I relied mostly on the park guide that the rangers give you when you come in for navigating.

Since the trip though I have figured out how to make the map portion much more usable, which is good since some National Parks are no longer handing out the park guides to save paper. In the settings section of the app (at the very bottom of the side menu) turn off cluster map pins.

Although this still is not perfect (it would be nice if you could set some filters) it is much more usable. If you have bookmarked any spot it will appear as a tan pin making those easier to find. I hope to see more improvements to Chimani's maps in the future.

Also remember that you can download the maps to the app before you head out so that if you run into dead zones (you will) the map will still be available to you.

Badges and Account

As mentioned above there is a section of the app hidden in the title banner (also appearing on the side menu) called my Chimani. This is the area that stores your bookmarks and also your badges. Because I couldn't find this portion during our trip I never used it. So I don't know a lot about the badges, but it appears that if you hit the plus icon on an activity or place in the app then you will get the badge for that thing. I tried it on a bunch of the things we did down in Arches, but never got close to leveling up my rank, so I think the "verified" visits must be worth more, but I haven't tried since I am not on location currently. The badges are a nice way of keeping track of what you have done though.

Sum Up

The Chimani apps are really useful, despite a few drawbacks they will help make your trip to Arches and/or Canyonlands a lot better. You can't complain too much about something that is free. If you use my tips in this post it should work out even better than it did for us on our trip. Remember that Chimani has apps for most of the National Parks, but they all have different features depending on what the park has available (such as shuttle bus schedules in the Grand Canyon).