Yup, still not the post on the tech hardware we are going to be bringing with, but this is close!

Being very large nerds who run a web startup Jamie and I will need consistent and reliable access to the Internet throughout our entire trip across Canada and the United States.

We’ve decided to go with SIM cards with three different providers to provide us with the fastest and most reliable access possible. Usually Jamie uses Wind Mobile with a Nexus 4 and I use Telus Mobility with an iPhone 5, but neither of us want to spend the whole time using our phones to tether and thus draining our batteries, so we have decided to pick up a few extra SIMs to provide us the best coverage possible and get a mobile hotspot!

• Wind Mobile SIM – For use in major cities! Wind provides us unlimited data which we will happily abuse. We will be spending a lot of time in Toronto and the Ontario areas they offer coverage in so it will get some pretty heavy use.
• Telus SIM – For the rest of our time inside of Canada we will be using our Telus SIM. We will need this for our entire far east leg of the trip where we will be spending a lot of time camping.
• Roam Mobility SIM – Roaming rates for Canadian providers data in the U.S. is absolutely insane. It usually is around multiple dollars per Megabyte of transfer, while Roam Mobility is going to cost us all of $0.02 per Megabyte AND offers us LTE!

For our mobile hotspot we decided to go with Sierra Wireless’ AirCard 754S Mobile Hotspot. It provides LTE coverage and is compatible with a wide variety of different basebands. It was also fairly cheap and easy to obtain an unlocked version of. The long battery life will also come in handy when we are camping so we will be able to work in the evenings when not on the road.

The mobile hotspot also provides very useful external antenna ports, but we’ve yet to be able to find anything that would work with it that you can mount on to your car, which is something we would really like to be able to do. Some of our stops are fairly out of the way and the extra antenna strength would be nice to have!

With the amount of days and amount of kilometers we are planning on our road trip this summer i spent a lot of time looking at different applications (both web and desktop) for us to use to plan out our route. With the complexity of this trip, especially the fact we are going through two different countries, we had a hard time finding a tool to assist with this.

We needed something that was available on both desktop and mobile (Preferably with offline syncing, or just the ability to print). We needed support for multiple stops and map data of Canada and the U.S.

There are a few different apps that are built to assist with this but they are all not great and don’t do that good of a job. I’ve got a break down of the most popular ones below.

FreeTrip.com (web) – Doesn’t have real support for multiple stops. Is very ugly. Just doesn’t do a good job all around.
Furkot (web) – Looks fantastic, works well, but is very limited in it’s customization. Generated a route for you and there seems to be no easy way to modify it.
CAA’s TripTik Travel Planner (web) – Probably the best of the bunch but no way to make comments or notes on stops which is kind of necessary for
TripIt’s Travel Planner (web) – Fantastic for any trip that isn’t a road trip, not so much for the road trips.
Knapsack (mac) – Fairly expensive at $29.99 and not the best looking. I tried the free trial and it isn’t that flexible.
If you have any more suggestions for apps or web apps then i’m happy to hear them!

The method we ended up deciding on is pretty boring but incredibly effective: Google Maps and Google Docs.
When planning i just have the Google Map open in the left half of my screen with our full route planned out, then on the right half a giant Google Doc.
With Google Maps we can pull out a permalink that has the entire route mapped out on it with all of our stops. Google Maps also gives very conservative estimates on how long it will take for each leg of the trip which is great to have.
In the Google Doc we have it broken into a few sections. The most important is the trip itself, which is broken down by Day. Each day has details on where we are going from and to, where we are staying, what we are doing, etc. etc.
It’s not the prettiest solution but it’s the most flexible we’ve found so far and the only one that meets all of our needs!

Our promise of a post with all of our tech hardware is still in the works, we are still researching and buying all that we need! Good 3G/LTE Antennas that are car mountable are hard to find.

I’m excited to announce Kerplunc’s 2013 Summer Road Trip! This June Jamie and Matthew will be driving all of the way across North America and back!

We will be starting out in Tofino, BC (On Vancouver Island) and going all of the way to Newfoundland! On our way back we will be going through Northern U.S. and visiting Jameson in Wisconsin!

We will be blogging throughout this trip and posting lots of photos. We will be going to NXNE in Toronto and hopefully will find some other events to go to on our trip!

Currently we are still in the planning stages but our next post will be about the tech hardware that we will be bringing with us for working on the road.

If you have any suggestions for places we should stop, things we should see, restaurants we should eat at then make sure to leave us a comment!