Nerve Endings Firing Away

Our recent trip to San Francisco was the first one equipped with the iPhone. We decided to get the iPhone after the towing truck guy fleeced us on our trip to Galveston. And now we can safely say that the iPhone is an indispensable part of our future travel plans. It was immensely useful during our trip and in fact, enhanced our experience. I assume this would be true of any smartphone.

San Francisco is a public transit-friendly city to begin with and given its proximity to Silicon Valley, is also home to tech professionals and enthusiasts. That means, there is no dearth of apps for the iPhone. We downloaded quite a few free ones that provided basic information on maps, train & bus schedules but even if you didn’t have any apps, the basic features of the iPhone couple of web-friendly websites for the city are adequate. The iBart app gave us the exact arrival times of trains when you punched in two points in its system including the travel time. Similarly, the Next Muni website is awesome (when it works). It gives you the arrival times of the cable cars or buses on your route provided you know where you are.

The default Maps app on the iPhone is handy to figure out where you are located by activating the Current Location feature. This feature also live-tracks you as you are traveling in a bus or a cable car in order to help you figure out how far your destination is. It’s actually fun but you rather not be transfixed at your screen otherwise you are missing out on the sights as you travel and likely to be mistaken as a snob on Nob Hill. The food apps, Yelp and Urbanspoon are extremely useful in looking up places to eat near your current locations and the corresponding reviews let you avoid a potential health hazard. It also prevent you from impulsively dashing into the first place you see when in fact, the place around the corner is rated highly. We discovered Shangri-La, a Nepalese restaurant, and XOX Truffles, a coffee shop using these apps.

There were two times when we were absolutely relieved to have access to the Internet. Once was when we were checking up a bus route back to the Palace of Fine Arts from the Golden Gate Bridge. We had hiked all the way from the Marina to the Golden Gate through Crissy Field and were in no condition to walk back. The Next Muni website gave us the exact time and location of the bus that would take us back. (We highly recommend buying the 1-3 day pass if you are using public transit in San Francisco. It pays off easily since each trip is $5 if you buy individual tickets.) The second time was when our flight was canceled at the airport and the only way we found out was when Ash checked her email to get a notification from Expedia. We were quickly able to look up rental cars in Dallas to see that none were available helping us decide to postpone our flight back by a day instead of being on constant standby. We looked up a hotel nearby, called it up and asked for the shuttle service. Without the iPhone, it would’ve be virtually impossible looking up a phone on a chaotic airport on Christmas Eve.

If you have been contemplating getting a smartphone, go ahead and buy it. It is definitely worth it when you are traveling and with unreliable flight schedules, it can be your savior. Having an iPhone makes carrying a laptop redundant provided you’ve enough memory on your SD cards and get reliable 3G coverage from your provider (We didn’t have any infamous AT&T coverage issues). Other apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr help you stay in touch with your social network while you are traveling but I recommend not posting or using it too much for obvious reasons. Since I use an iPhone, I recommend it but am sure users of other smartphones have similar tales.