Trip Hopping My Way Down The Road
Trip Hopping has been my obsession lately. It's my revived travel app that takes on just about everything travel-related for a rambler like myself, and I'll get into that shortly.
Otherwise, it's been a good year. I got back to the USA this past Halloween and have since hitchhiked my way from the east coast to the west coast, spending New Year's Eve 2025 in Reno, then bending to Northern California before dropping to the bottom.
If you're not listening to my podcast, the Freestyle Travel Show, you're missing out. My recent travels are talked about in the latest episodes, you can fully catch up through these links or your favorite podcast app:
In February I reached Phoenix, which has been talked about for a while now. This brings us to Trip Hopping. Quick history lesson: I started traveling like this in 2007, started using Couchsurfing to meet people and find places to stay, and immediately decided to make a complimentary website for people looking for rides. A Couchsurfing host named Larry in Phoenix liked the idea, so we started calling the site Trip Hopping.
We had several get-togethers to work on the site, calling it either a hackathon, a collective, or a brew. Eventually, ongoing travel and distractions (with me being the sole dedicated developer) lead to the site fading away.
I'd think about it from time to time, and a couple of years ago those thoughts became more frequent. No other apps or sites were hitting the mark, none achieving the vision I had in my head as the perfect travel app that could tie it all together. A combination of aggregating all the great existing sites and information, as well as providing a platform for spontaneous meetups and "digital hitchhiking" and other such things.
It had been years since I'd written a line of code, but upon discovering a framework called Flutter, I was reinvigorated. Flutter was developed to write one codebase that would work across web, Android, and iOS, rather than having to learn different programming languages and maintain scattered code for it all to work. There are other ways to do this now, but Flutter is what caught my attention.
One day I was watching some YouTube videos about it, the next day I was installing it and playing around with it... and that same day I was suddenly rebuilding Trip Hopping.
So, here I am, back in Phoenix. What was supposed to be another "brew" became a solo mission (Larry decided at the last minute that the house wasn't suitable for a crew of people), but it has been productive nonetheless - and at least one person did indeed drop in anyhow.
I'm at the tail-end of the session now, with the largest milestone being the release of the app on the public Google Play store for Android.
The app now shows all the ways to get from A to B, from posting rideshares directly to pulling in data from all over to show other rideshare sites results, flight costs, buses, trains, and even the best actual spots to hitchhike from, as well as direct links to relevant hitchwiki articles.
Members can go "live" when they want to share a ride or meet up for a beer or a hike or to hang out wherever they are. We can share our upcoming trips to see where each other are going and comment and like them like any other social network. People can post articles, advice, entertainment, or unique spots on the map to share - that's all a bit like a travel-specific Reddit that also intelligently puts these links where they need to be seen (like a link to a shuttle between Salt Lake and Las Vegas when you're searching that route, or a campsite near a hot springs when you're looking for a place to stay nearby).
I even added a feature that lets you import the contacts on your phone so you can see them on a map, so you never miss out on seeing an old friend when you're closeby, even if they're not on Trip Hopping.
It's awesome. There's more. I love it.
And also... I'm starting to go stir-crazy. It's not full-on, but I'm just about to that point - time to move. A month in one spot is a lot for me, so it's saying something that I'm still not fully losing my mind yet.
So, I'll get some more done this week, then it's off to... northern Arizona to see friends? Laughlin to try and make a few hundred bucks at the casino? Camping in the desert somewhere? Eastbound..? Definitely east bound at some point, perhaps over the Atlantic depending on a thing or two.
We'll see, but yes, I gotta keep moving. Another "brew" is not out of the question, maybe even in the coming months in a place like North Carolina. Trip Hopping is already far better than it was 10+ years ago, and I'm not going to let it fade away this time.
That's it for the moment. If you haven't checked out my Patreon page, that's where I post an exclusive micro-podcast a few times a week and other good stuff for the people who really want to support my travels and the other things I'm up to... like pouring hundreds of hours of my time into making the best free travel app on the planet. Just saying.
Good times, catch you on the next one.
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