Making the most of your gps enabled phone

MAPS.ME, Sygic, and Maprika are a few of the apps I have on my phone. They're all free, which I like, but they will all be used in different ways while hiking.

Sygic is better for what's in the area when we're in town.
MAPS.ME for entering latitude and longitude coordinates I'm sent for meeting up with someone or someplace where I know the coordinates.
Maprika for user uploaded maps, with a red line where the A.T. runs through all of the Eastern states.

A lot of these apps will have you download different states to be able to navigate offline.

To top it off, add a KML file (Keyhole Markup Language) and we have even more useful information for when we have no phone signal.  A KML file can be used to generate a series of landmarks that will appear on a map.  We downloaded two to use so far, one is for the shelters on the A.T. and the other denotes the available post offices near to the trail.

This picture was taken from MAPS.ME.  The red line is the A.T.  The pinpoints along the line are the shelters along the trail.  The green dot represents where I pressed the screen to show which post office is available in the area.

If we were actually on the trail you would see a blue triangle representing our location.

We visited Sandy Bottom Nature Park today and liked the environment. While we walked on the longest trail, 3+ miles, we talked about coming to this park to walk every day. It's only 3 miles away and there isn't the danger of walking on neighborhood roads with traffic. While the paths are wide, the scenery made us imagine ourselves out on the trail already.

Because all of the apps use a downloadable file for reference, it doesn't matter if my phone doesn't have a signal to make calls.
During our walk I opened MAPS.ME to show a screen capture example of my navigation resources while we're on the trail.  I already had the Virginia state map on my phone since the A.T. runs through the whole state.  I turned on the GPS and waited for a lock.

These two pictures are about 3 minutes apart showing are progress, counter clockwise, around the trail.  You can see the blue triangle representing our position.