I almost didn’t send my mom the replay of our Big Sur drive. She uses her phone for calls and for looking at pictures of the grandkids, and I figured a moving map would get the same “looks fun!” text she sends for everything else.
She watched it three times. Then she called to ask about a 45-minute stop I hadn’t mentioned to anyone.
The trip itself was simple. We drove Highway 1 on a Saturday, my family in our car and my brother Dan’s family plus their dog in his. Dan and I were both in the same Konvoyage trip, so each car could see the other’s dot while the navigation ran. I came home with far too many photos and spent most of Sunday evening cutting them down to 30. Late that night, mostly to get it off my list, I forwarded Mom the Konvoyage trip replay link from the summary email.
What she asked about was a stop
The replay opens in a browser, so she didn’t need the app or an account to watch it.
Her question was about McWay Falls. When both cars sit still for more than a couple of minutes, the replay doesn’t make you watch two parked dots. It skips ahead and shows a small label, in our case “Stopped · 45m”, while the clock under the map jumps forward. Mom saw that label and wanted to know what took so long. The real answer was my daughter refusing to leave the overlook until a sea otter she was sure she’d seen came back, and it never did. I had one photo of the falls themselves, and it looks like every other picture of McWay Falls on the internet.
Before the replay, and after
My old routine after a family trip was about two hours of sorting and cropping, then an album link dropped into the family group chat. Somebody would heart the sunset shot and the conversation would move on to whose turn it was to host Thanksgiving.
This time the replay went out Sunday night and the photos on Monday. The photos got their hearts.
My son wanted to see the part of the replay where “we went really slow,” which turned out to be one-lane traffic control at a construction zone north of Gorda. Dan called to complain that I hadn’t waited for him after Ragged Point, which was a bold move on his part. The replay’s Timeline panel shows the exact time he sent his “Wait for me” quick message. You can also watch my dot pull over a couple of minutes later and sit there until his catches up. We ended up having a proper debrief of the whole trip over the phone, mostly about where the gap between the cars opened up and whether the dog really needed that many stops.
I drove a delivery route for six years before I moved into the office, and the only part of that job I liked was the end-of-day stop report. It listed every stop and how long I sat at each one, and it explained my day better than I ever could at the depot. Watching our Big Sur replay gave me that same feeling, except this time nobody was going to ask me to account for 45 minutes at a waterfall.
A few weeks later Dan’s neighbor borrowed the link to plan the same drive, and the stop labels showed her where we stopped and for how long.
I still take pictures
The one of my daughter at the McWay overlook, squinting at the water and still waiting for that otter, is on our fridge. Dan says it’s the best picture I took all weekend, and he’s probably right.
Point Reyes, with Mom along
Last month Mom came with us on a drive up to Point Reyes, wedged in the back seat between the kids. We got home after dark, and before I had the cooler out of the trunk she asked me to send her the replay.
She wanted to show her sister the stretch along Tomales Bay where the fog sat so low that Dan’s headlights were the only thing in my mirror. On the replay that part is two dots moving slowly along the edge of the water, which isn’t much to look at. My aunt watched it anyway and called the next morning to ask if there was room in one of the cars next time. The Point Reyes photos are still on my phone, unsorted.