Nobody likes driving through inclement weather. It doesn’t matter what your name is, nobody enjoys driving through torrential downpours or windstorms that push so hard against the side of your vehicle you begin to feel like you’re not the one steering anymore. In short, it’s awful.
Thanks to The Weather Channel and the mapping samurais at Stamen Design, you can now plan your trip according to the weather conditions of the places you’ll be traveling through. The new tool, Trip Planner, which is now available on TWC’s site, will tell you the daylight availability and weather forecasts of your departure and arriving locations as well as all points in-between. Additionally, you can get forecasts of up to five days in advance if you want to see which day might be the best for avoiding those scattered showers.
The map will generate the most common route to your destination but if you see that you’re going to encounter some rough weather and would rather avoid it, Trip Planner has a great feature where you can simply drag your route away from the stormy parts. See below, where there are some thunderstorms east of Cumberland?
Simple grab the white dot on the blue route line and drag the route away from the storm in order avoid all that mess.
Being able to easily plot treks that avoid undesirable weather conditions would have been more than enough to make the trip-planning that much more pleasant, but the Stamen designers decided to go one more step awesomer and build in some recommendations for site-seeing and food-eating along the way with the help of the Yelp API. When you’re planning your route on Trip Planner, you can click on “Show Yelp options” to display all the different options for businesses or recreational spots you might like to hit up.
TWC’s Trip Planner is a great tool to keep you dry while you’re travelling and keep those sunny skies overhead.
Also, really related to nothing other than the fact that Stamen makes fun maps, I wanted to share this image they created of all the possible weather predictions at once. I just think it looks pretty.
