Awesome Travel Apps

I’m excitedly counting down to our trip to Asia, which means I’ve been going a little overboard loading up my iPhone with some extra apps to help make our trip go as smoothly as possible. Here are a few I’m finding particularly useful as we make our final travel preparations:

1. Wunderlist is to-do list app that I’ve been using to keep tabs on all the things I want to do, see, and eat – not just for vacation, but at home here in NYC as well! You can also share your lists with traveling companions, so they can contribute and collaborate at will – much easier than emailing back and forth a zillion times!

2. I’m anticipating a lot of “Ok so now where do we go—OH NO, NO INTERNET” type of moments, so CityMaps2Go will surely be a life saver. It makes detailed maps of various cities available offline, so they’re accessible without a data connection!

3. If you ever find yourself in a last minute “I should probably know some crucial words while visiting a foreign country” panic, then Learn Japanese (which is available in a lot of other languages) is for you! It provides audio snippets of simple phrases and words that one would legitimately use in a real life scenario, so you can memorize them without having to learn the language in its entirety. And in a worst case scenario, you could just play the clips to someone in a desperate attempt to ask “Where is the bathroom?”, although I really hope it doesn’t come down to that!

4. Word Lens is an incredible app that translates words in REAL TIME as you scan them with your phone. I screamed “What is this sorcery!!” the first time I tried it. The translations are definitely not always accurate, and it works far better for large standalone text than for a paragraph in a book, but the technology behind it is pretty darn impressive. In the screenshot above, it translated the title page of my copy of “Le Petit Prince” to “The Small Prince”. Close enough!