Writing this from Sedona, AZ as I travel. Maintaining weekly writing cadence is really hard especially when on a family trip with busy schedule. Instead of pushing myself to write a long essay or skipping a week I decided to vibe-code something really fast and at the same time be practical (maybe with a bit of extra work but not today).

Create a tool that generates interactive html page of a trip. You give it some locations of places you visited (just names is enough) and throw a bunch of GPX files with tracking of hikes/walks you’ve made. My GPX files come from Garmin Connect where I loaded 10 of those from the trip and threw into “trip_data” folder, but I believe it could be easy to exten the tool to actually connect to your Strava/Garmin or other tracking software you use.

Here is github repo for the tool: https://github.com/andriybuday/tripmap

When you run it on a folder that has GPX files and stops.yaml file it generates a map that looks like this:

Here is a direct link in case the map doesn’t show embedded for you.

I think it is really nice to get this customized map that connects both driving directions and hikes that I’ve done. I didn’t put everything on the map from my trip (like hotels or restaurants where I ate) but that could easily be done, so then you have really nice comprehensive map just for yourself with all of the actual places you visited.

Because AI generated the script, I asked it to also write this paragraph: The tool is built in Python using folium to generate the interactive map, gpxpy to load GPX tracks from my Garmin watch, OSRM for real driving directions between stops (no API key needed), and Nominatim for resolving place names into coordinates. Stops are configured in a simple YAML file, and the output is a single self-contained HTML file hosted on GitHub Pages.

Conclusion: similarly to my previous blog post where I created concert playlist maker this blog post just proves the point that instead of looking for a ready solution online that may or may not exist it is super easy to build things yourself without too much effort. The best thing is that it is exactly what you need.

Another conclusion is this: staying consistent is really hard, especially when traveling or when things are happening in life. But finding a low effort way to build something even a bit useful makes it possible. Happy I wrote this.