Travel writer and guidebook author, Lee Atkinson, talks about creating her best-selling ‘Australian Road Trips’ app
The last thing I intended when I launched my app, Australian Road Trips, was to upset my partner. After six months of hard work, I was keen to show it off and hopefully get some praise. But the more he looked at the app, the darker his face grew, before he finally exploded, ‘Why did you have to put that in the app? Now everyone is going to go there!’
Being a travel writer is one of the best jobs in the world. You get to travel all over the place, see great things, meet amazing people and then share the stories with your readers. But occasionally it has a downside.
Sometimes, you find a place so special that you want to keep it yourself, so that your hidden hideaway stays secret. Spots like the lonely beaches near where we live on the mid-north coast, the free camps beside the Darling River in outback NSW and the riverside camps we found last summer on the Old Grafton Road, breathtakingly beautiful but inexplicably deserted in the middle of the Christmas holidays. We love them because nobody knows about them and there is never anyone else there.
To share or not to share – that’s the travel writer’s dilemma.
In the end though, I usually can’t help myself, and the hitherto hidden gem gets an entry in my app.
One of the things I enjoyed most about creating an app is that you are not limited by the amount of pages you have. When I first launched the app back in December last year it included 25 great driving routes around the country. There’s now 40, with around 100 new entries since then, and it keeps growing.
Every time I find somewhere new that I think is worth going to or a little bit special, I add it to the app, so it just gets bigger and bigger. And for the user who has already downloaded the app, all those updates are free.
And users can leave a comment on the app so that everyone can see if something has changed since my last visit, or temporarily closed (which is very important when it comes to roads and road trips!), or even if they just want to share a favourite spot that I might have missed.
People often ask me how I choose the best road trips, but it all depends on what you like. I love camping and roughing it in remote deserts, but there are probably a lot of people out there who would much prefer to be driving along the coast and staying in luxury B&Bs (I must admit, I like that too!).
The great thing about the app is that you don’t have to follow my advice, you can use the app to plan your own unique road rip according to your interests using the sorting filters: you can create a family-friendly road trip, a gourmet road trip, 4WD, outback, coastal … whatever you want really. Or, it will just tell you the best foodie finds or great camping spots near you, if that’s all you want to know.
Finding great places and good drives to put in the app is the easy bit… it’s deciding what not to include that’s tricky. I’ve never been good at keeping secrets!
Lee Atkinson is the author of 11 travel books, including eight guide books on travelling in and around Australia. Her app, Australian Road Trips is available from iTunes and Google Play: see www.ozyroadtripper.com.au for links.
