(Keywords: Sightseeing - Washington DC)

GPS Tour of Washington, D. C.

Featuring i-gotU Travel Logger

Washington Monument This was the best trip I didn't go on. Instead, my wife and oldest son went, taking my i-gotU Travel Logger. I told them to keep it with the camera and take lots of pictures. When they returned we created a travel blog from the trip - complete with maps of where they went, pictures and descriptions of the places they visited. The result is like being there.

The nation's capitol is one of the most popular travel destinations in the United States. I still have memories of going to Washington when I was a child, and I wanted my son to see all the monuments and memorials also. When the school announced the trip we were all excited, but we could not all go. So, I decided to stay behind and my wife agreed to collect all the information for this GPS Tour of Washington, DC.

Check out this 2-day sightseeing adventure from the @trip (a-trip.com) web site. And read below for more about the i-gotU Travel Logger, @-trip PC software, and a-trip.com.

GPS Tour of Washington, DC

Download

File: WashingtonDC.gpx (GPs eXchange format)
Published: 9 March 2010
Class A1 Data
Points of Interest: 15 Waypoints including:

Petersen House
Fords Theater
Holocaust Museum
World War II Memorial
Lincoln Memorial
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
US Capitol
The White House
Korean War Memorial
Kennedy Center
Jefferson Memorial
Air and Space Museum
National Gallery of Art
Museum of Natural History
Iwo Jima Memorial

Review of i-gotU Travel Logger

i-gotU GPS Travel Logger from Mobile Action Technology Inc, is a simple and convenient way to record your travels with GPS tracking. The associated software, @-trip PC, enables you to geotag your photos, locating your pictures on a map along with your GPS tracklog. Documenting your travels with i-gotU and @-trip PC is easy and the results are intuitive trip reports.

gt-120 For this trip we used the GT-120, a small, light-weight, water-resistant GPS data logger shown at left. The GT-120 has a USB connection used for changing setup parameters and uploading data. There is a Bluetooth version, the GT-200 that connects to computer wirelessly. Both versions come with software for creating, editing and uploading to on-line trip blogging and sharing web site (a-trip.com).

Set-up is straight forward. I did not want my wife to have to worry about turning the GT-120 on and off, so I used the setup feature that allowed me to schedule when to log data. I set the schedule to it turn on a 10 in the morning and turn off 6 in the evening. All she had to do was charge the GT-120 over night because 8 hours of active logging is about all the battery would allow.

When my wife returned from the trip to Washington, I uploaded the data from the GT-120 to the @-trip PC program. Sure enough, there were two days of track logs that I could see overlaid on the map. Then I imported the pictures she took during the trip. The @-trip PC software helped me locate her pictures on the map by matching up the time the picture was taken with the GPS location recorded at the same time - a process called geo-tagging.

There were a few photos that were not properly located on the map. This was because the my wife accidentally left the GT-120 on the bus when she stepped off to take pictures. This problem was easy to resolve with the software which allowed me to manually locate the pictures on the map. On future trips we will remember to keep the GT-120 strapped to the camera and not to the case.

We completed the trip "blog" by giving the photos titles and descriptions. Then when satisfied with the result, we uploaded to a-trip.com so that we could share the trip with friends and family. Below is a screenshot of the @trip web site showing the Washington DC trip in 3D view.