I assumed I would remember a 14-hour drive. It was the longest single day of driving I’ve done (Atlanta to Miami, five cars, a group chat that never went quiet), and I’d have bet money I could narrate every exit. Then the replay link came through the next morning, I opened it over coffee, and a few minutes in I was watching our car leave the interstate for a town I have no memory of whatsoever.
I still couldn’t tell you its name without zooming in on the map.
Our dot wandered through side streets for a good while (a traffic reroute, probably, though nobody in our car remembers that either) as everyone else stayed on the highway and pulled further ahead. I was driving that stretch. Tess, in the passenger seat, claims she was asleep, which is very convenient for her.
If you’ve never opened one, the replay plays the whole trip back on a map in your browser, with each person in the trip as a dot moving along the roads they actually drove. There are no route lines drawn on it, so you watch the day happen in order instead of looking at a finished squiggle. A bar along the bottom lets you drag back and forth, and the speed buttons sit next to it. When the entire group was parked somewhere, it doesn’t make you sit through that. It fast-forwards and shows a small “Stopped” label with how long you were there.
Start with the boring part
My instinct was to skip ahead to the parts I knew were funny. I’m glad I didn’t, because the start of the trip had stuff in it I’d never have caught otherwise.
I created the trip in Konvoyage the night before (of course I did), and the Timeline panel on the side of the replay lists that first, with the clock time. Then it lists every join. Ray’s name shows up there after we’d already pulled out of the parking lot, which explains a lot about why he spent the whole first hour asking where we were in the chat. If I’d started the replay at the Florida line, I’d have missed that he was basically chasing us out of Atlanta. Clicking an entry in the Timeline jumps the map to that moment (useful, and I didn’t find it until my second time through).
Somewhere around Valdosta
We’d all agreed on the same exit for gas.
Everyone pulled into the station on the right side of the road except Ray, who crossed the overpass to a different station on the other side. On the replay you see the dots bunch up at one corner of the exit and his dot keep going, across the highway, like it has somewhere better to be. Nobody noticed at the time. We were pumping gas and assuming the group was complete, and he was doing the exact same thing alone. His defence, when I sent him the link, was that it was a few cents cheaper and he didn’t think anybody would care (we did, and still bring it up).
The replay also caught me on something less funny. Somewhere south of there, our dot sits still while the others carry on without us, and I couldn’t place it at first. Tess could. It was a rest area, and I’d told everyone afterwards that I drove my shift straight through without a break. Because we were the only car stopped, the replay doesn’t fast-forward through it, so you just watch our dot sit there as the rest of the group drifts off down the screen. I’m not sure why I’d erased that particular stop.
Watch the end too, even if by then you’re tired of it. Arrivals come into the Timeline one at a time with clock times, and ours came in last (I won’t say by how much, but the town was involved). When playback finishes, an end screen adds up the distance, how long the trip took, how many people were in it and how many chat messages got sent. I knew the chat had been busy. Not that busy, though, and I’m fairly sure most of it was Ray asking which exit.
How I’d watch it next time
I’ll concede that nobody wants to sit through a whole day of driving again, even fast-forwarded. So this is roughly what I do now.
Open it within a few days, while you can still argue about what happened (the link works for 30 days and then it’s gone, so if you mean to watch it “eventually,” put it on a list). It starts at a speed that fits the trip into a reasonable watch, so if you want the whole drive in one sitting, just press play and leave it. If something looks wrong, drag the bar back and drop the speed to 1x so you can follow the dot through it. When you’re hunting for a specific moment (say, the moment someone reported police), open the Timeline instead and click the entry, since it’s quicker than dragging around. And if the stop you’re looking for seems to vanish, it’s probably because the whole group was parked and it got fast-forwarded, so watch for the “Stopped” label.
After that, send it to the group before anyone starts telling their version of the trip. Photos still matter to me, but a replay shows how the day actually moved, and it’s a lot harder for Ray to argue with.