The night we got back from Moab, still smelling of sunscreen and campfire smoke, I propped the laptop on a pillow at the end of my bed and pressed play on the trip replay, the way you would rewatch a dashcam clip of a deer leaping across the road. I had led seven cars out of Denver at sunrise a few days earlier, and in my head that drive had gone perfectly. Nobody got lost or called me in a panic, and we rolled into camp with the cliffs going orange behind the tents. I fully expected the replay to be a victory lap.
That idea fell apart before the song playing on my speaker had even finished.
A dashcam movie with no camera in it
There is no footage in the replay at all, which took me a moment to get used to. Every phone in the trip was sending its location while we drove, and afterwards Konvoyage redraws all of it on a map in your browser, each person a colored dot sliding along the roads they actually took. You get a play button and a bar along the bottom that you can drag back and forth like the timeline on any video. Speed buttons sit next to it, so you can crawl through a tricky junction at real pace or send a whole day of interstate flying past while your tea goes cold. The link had arrived in a notification and again in the trip summary email, and it opened straight in Chrome without me installing or signing into anything.
The part I hadn’t expected was the messages. When someone sent a message during the drive, it pops up over the map at the moment they sent it, and small colored ticks along the bar warn you where the chatter is before you reach it. Somebody in the middle of our line had reported police just past Green River, and on the replay a little siren pin appeared on that stretch of interstate right when she tapped it, which made me laugh out loud alone in my bedroom because I remembered braking hard for no visible reason. If your group already uses the quick messages instead of texting each other at highway speed, all of those show up in the playback too. There is also a Timeline panel down the side that lists the trip as plain lines with clock times next to them, and I ended up leaning on that later when I wanted to know exactly when things happened rather than roughly.
Where Devon went
Devon drives a dented green Subaru that rattles over every expansion joint, and he was somewhere toward the back of the line that morning.
Near Rifle his dot peeled off the interstate into a gas station and simply stopped. On my laptop the rest of us kept gliding west in a tidy colored chain while his dot sat there, perfectly still, and because I had the speed turned up, I watched the gap between him and us stretch out like taffy across the screen. My face went hot as I watched, because I was the one up front with the destination in the nav and the group chat open on the passenger seat, and I had driven on for ages without once noticing that a friend had vanished from my mirrors. Nobody in the front cars noticed either, which I would love to blame on them, but I was leading.
When I brought it up, Devon said, “I watched it again last night and I still can’t believe you didn’t notice I was gone for twenty minutes.”
The gas stop turned out to be the small thing. Further along, through De Beque Canyon, where the Colorado River runs green and fast beside the road and the walls close in so tight the radio fades to static, our line had quietly split in half. The cars in the middle had drifted well behind the lead group and stayed there for most of the canyon. During the drive my map looked fine, because everyone was on the same road and every dot was moving, and the distance grew slowly enough that it never looked like a problem at the size of a phone screen. Squashed into a few minutes of fast playback, it was obvious. We had been traveling as separate groups for a long stretch without a single person saying so.
Nobody gets hurt over a gas station stop on a sunny morning. A blown tire in that canyon with no signal, while the people ahead of you assume you are right behind them, is a much worse afternoon, and watching the replay was the first time I really pictured it.
I used to think talking through a trip afterwards was something only very organised people did, the kind who label their spice jars. Now the replay is that conversation for us, mostly because it does the remembering for everyone and nobody has to be polite about the bits that went sideways. I watch it soon after getting home, while the sand is still in the car mats and the trip still feels close.
Watching it with the people who were in the cars
Everyone in the trip gets the same replay link, so you are not stuck describing it to your friends from memory, and there is a Share button on the page if you want to send it to someone who stayed home. A few evenings later a few of us got on a video call and played it together, each of us on our own screen, pausing and dragging the bar back whenever someone shouted. It turned into a kind of commentary track, with people saying things like “that’s where I hit the construction” and “that’s where you all disappeared around the bend and I thought I’d taken a wrong turn.”
Devon caught something I had missed completely, because he had been behind it and seen it happen. Coming into Grand Junction, one of the cars had taken the wrong exit, and in the replay you can see the dot leave the interstate, wander a short way down a frontage road and then hurry back on. When we paused on that moment, the driver went bright red and admitted the whole car had been arguing about where to get tacos.
The one about my sister
After Moab I got a bit hooked and started opening the replay for short drives as well, including a couple of lazy Saturday runs up to Breckenridge with my sister Tess, the windows down and the pine smell coming in thick once we got past Idaho Springs. On both replays her dot fell back every time we pulled off for fuel, staying parked well after mine had already merged back onto the highway. I sent her a screenshot and asked what on earth she was doing in there. She replied with a photo of an enormous gas station coffee with whipped cream on top, and the next time we drove together she bought me one too, so I would stop timing her.