Every place on earth can anchor a lesson.
The constraint is on whose data we may store, never on where your children can go. A national park, a county historical society, a friend’s ranch and a historical marker at the end of a gravel road are all the same thing to the generator — they differ only in how much of the world’s description of them we are allowed to keep on your phone.
What gets stored, and what works with no signal
| Tier | What it is | What we store | Offline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canon | National Park Service, Recreation.gov, state park boundaries, Overture, the National Register, state historical commissions — bulk, openly licensed. | Everything. Name, description, hours, geometry, media, tags. | Full — searchable and browsable at zero bars. |
| Enriched | A place you discovered that also exists in an open dataset. | Matched on name and coordinates, then the open-licensed record is stored and the place is promoted to Canon. | Full, after one online lookup. |
| Linked | Everything else. The small-town museum, the roadside attraction, the alpaca farm, the county historical society. | Our own content only — the lesson plan we wrote, your notes, your photographs, the name you typed, the coordinates. | The lesson works offline. Only the map tap needs signal. |
The insight the whole thing rests on
The lesson plan is ours, not a mapping company’s. A generated field-trip guide — the objectives, the scavenger hunt, the questions, the printable journal pages, the differentiation across your children — is original content we own outright and may cache forever. The same is true of anything you type or photograph.
What we do not store is a third party’s description of the place. And you do not need that in the field. You need it when you are deciding whether to go and how to get there — which is exactly when you have signal.
Three ways in, and the third one matters most.
Offline search
Full-text and spatial search across every Canon place already on your device. No network, no account check, no spinner.
Online search at planning time
The “what is near Amarillo?” moment. We keep the identifier and the name you confirm, and discard the rest.
Just add it
Type a name and drop a pin, or long-press the map. This covers the roadside marker, the alpaca farm, and the kind of place that is in no dataset anywhere — which is frequently where the good day happens.
Your library is canon for you
Once your family has visited and documented a place, that record — your lessons, your photographs, your notes — belongs to your household permanently. The enrichment pipeline quietly tries to match your Linked places against open datasets in the background and promotes them when it finds one, so your offline experience improves without anyone doing anything.
The scoring is opinionated on purpose.
Import a route from RV LIFE Trip Wizard as GPX or CSV, or add stops by hand. We search a corridor around it — five miles for on-the-way, twenty-five for a short detour, sixty around an overnight stop, because when you are parked the real unit is a day trip from camp — and then score what we find.
- Age fit, with a floor. Nothing ranks well if it is miserable for the three-year-old. Twins are modelled explicitly: stroller access, a place to nurse, shade, indoor options.
- Skill need. Boosts places that cover under-served strands. This is what prevents the fourth rock museum this month.
- Cost, with your passes already applied. An interagency pass zeroes park entrance. Reciprocal museum networks are modelled too — for a family of seven, one science-centre membership good at three hundred others is a real number, and we will tell you when it pays for itself on your route.
- Nap windows. Anything that requires one to four in the afternoon is penalised.
- Logistics. A thirty-five-foot rig cannot park at a downtown museum. Unknown parking is a visible warning, never a silent omission.
- Season fit from climate normals, not forecasts — you are planning weeks ahead, and offline.
Prepare for offline
When the next stop has poor connectivity, the app blocks before departure and asks to download: maps, lesson packs, park facts, printables, ten to fifteen generated lessons for the stop ahead. That prompt is the feature that actually makes boondocking work. Everything else is plumbing.
Open data covers the parks. It does not cover the good stops.
We can seed thousands of national and state park units from public-domain sources on day one. What no dataset contains is the mining museum with the volunteer who lets children hold the ore, the pull-out where the fossils are, or which visitor centre has a changing table. That comes from families, and it is the single thing we cannot build alone.
Beta families document the places they actually stop at — a name, a pin, what worked for which ages, and a note the next family can use. That library is what makes the product worth paying for later, and the people who seed it should never pay more than the people who arrive after it is finished.