Each stop, on Walk of the Planets, tells interesting facts about the planet.

In the small city of Escanaba, MI, Pluto is thankfully still the 9th planet. Park your car at the end of Ludington Street, in downtown Escanaba and enjoy the light house and view of Little Bay de Noc. Then walk up to the corner of Ludington Street and 4th where you will find the Escanaba Library and the beginning of Walk of the Planets. The planets are spaced according to their distance from one another. Expect to walk the full length of downtown, if you want to go from Mercury through the astroid belt and finsish at Voyager.

When you reach Neptune, you’ll want to relax with a delicious cup of coffee and enjoy the beautiful interior of Stones Coffee Shop. While we did not try out the attached deli shop, it appeared to be a favorite of many locals.

For those that enjoy photography, you will want to bring your camera. This walk has lots of interesting scenery and architecture. For the walk back, try out some side streets and meander back to the bay. You’re likely to see a house or two with bathtubs turned verically and half burried in the yard. I’ll let you discover the reason for what seems like madness for yourself.

Be sure to eat a pasty for me while you are there. Tasty!

We occasionally drive up to Pennsylvania to visit Robin’s family. As it happens, our schedule usually puts us near DC and Baltimore at times that seem too close to rush hour to really want to chance driving I-95 straight through to Philadelphia. We’ve also noticed that I-95 from Fredericksburg to Alexandria is frustratingly stop-and-go. So, on our last few trips, we’ve made ample use of the iPhone’s internal GPS and the Maps application. While we don’t have experience using an Android-based phone or a Blackberry, Google offers much of the same functionality via the browser.

The iPhone’s also been a big help for other travel in New York, Northern California and just our general day trips around central North Carolina.

In that vein, here’s what we’ve found helpful when traveling:

• Seeing where backups are and re-routing around them (see the image to the right for why this is a good idea).
• Maps has added labels to buildings. There are also icons for restaurants, gas stations and such.
• Just being able to use the phone to search for what’s near-by is incredibly helpful. We found a Safeway-hosted Starbucks on an unfamiliar Delaware highway that way.
• The iPhone maps application and Google Maps both provide info on public transit in many cites. In New York, we could get directions that mixed the subway and walking and included departure times.
• Use Google street view to scope a couple streets over for food ideas.

There are also situations we’d like more assistance with:

• If traffic is “backed up,” it’d be helpful to know if it’s affect all lanes.
• Knowing where tolls are, what the toll is, and the status of E-ZPass lanes.
• If construction has moved a bus stop. Admittedly, this isn’t easy, but, over Labor Day weekend, we were a little frustrated trying to find the right stop for a bus that completely bypassed the street we were on in Lower Manhattan.

There’s also a caveat; Map locations and pinpoints are approximations. There are a number of restaurants and stores that aren’t accurately mapped, beyond being on the same block as where the map shows them.

Sure, adventuring in the unknown and finding your own way is a lot of fun, we’ve found solving small needs infinitely less frustrating when we can see we’re only a two block walk, or half-mile driving detour away from what we need. That keeps us happy travelers, eager to see what’s around the next bend with our own eyes.