The trip that became Trip Tracker

In August 2026 I cycled a loop out of Edinburgh through the Highlands with two friends, Kuba and Maciek: north through the Great Glen, along Glen Shiel, round the top through Torridon and Wester Ross, and back down through Inverness. Six riding days, roughly 513 km, around 6,700 m of climbing, and two extra days in Edinburgh on either end to fly in, build bikes, and fly back out.

This wasn't a trip that needed a product. It needed three phones to agree on the same plan. Where we were sleeping, how far tomorrow was, whether the next town had a shop, who still owed who for the taxi from the airport. The kind of thing that normally lives across a group chat, a shared spreadsheet nobody opens on their phone, and someone's memory.

The route

Loosely a there-and-back loop, weighted toward the west coast for the scenery and timed to come back through Inverness for the train home. The numbers below are the real ones from the trip — the same day-by-day data that ended up seeding this app's first test trip.

• 1
  Arrival — Edinburgh

  Bikes off the flight, a van and two taxis to get three sets of bike boxes and three riders to the same guest house.
  rest day
• 2
  Edinburgh → Fort Augustus

  Up early to rebuild bikes and raid the Lidl in Musselburgh before the road actually started.
  56.9 km · +585 m
• 3
  Fort Augustus → Ratagan

  The Great Glen, then Glen Shiel — the run most people picture when they picture the Highlands.
  85.9 km · +1,161 m
• 4
  Ratagan → Achnasheen

  Kyle of Lochalsh, then Torridon. Also the day we discovered a sleeping bag had been left at home — £10 well spent at the hostel shop.
  88 km · +1,160 m
• 5
  Achnasheen → Dundonnell

  The big one. Poolewe and Loch Maree, and the most climbing of any single day on the trip.
  93 km · +1,183 m
• 6
  Dundonnell → Bonar Bridge

  Corrieshalloch Gorge, then Ullapool for the best coffee of the week.
  90 km · +996 m
• 7
  Bonar Bridge → Inverness → Edinburgh

  The last stage, then a well-earned train back to Edinburgh with the bikes in the guard's van.
  99.6 km · +607 m
• 8
  Edinburgh — sightseeing

  A day to walk instead of pedal, before the evening flight home.
  rest day

A route this long, with three people and no phone signal for most of it, turns out to be exactly the kind of thing a spreadsheet is bad at.

Why the spreadsheet stopped being a spreadsheet

Before we left, I'd built the planning document the way most people do: a spreadsheet for the itinerary, a shared note for accommodation links, a group chat for logistics, and a packing list that existed in three slightly different versions across three phones. It worked, in the way that things work right up until the point they don't — usually somewhere with no signal, at the end of a long day, when nobody can remember whether tonight's place includes breakfast.

So a few weeks before the trip I built a single web page instead: one file, no backend, just the itinerary, the packing list, a weather chart, and a running budget, all baked into the page and shared as a link. Everyone could open it on their phone without installing anything. It was rough, but during the actual week of riding it did the one thing the spreadsheet never managed — everyone looked at the same version of the plan, on the same page, without anyone needing to ask "wait, is this the latest one?"

From one trip to a real app

That single-page planner did its job and should probably have stayed a private thing. But a few people who saw it during the trip asked if they could use something like it for their own trips — a different route, a different group, a different activity entirely. That's the actual origin of Trip Tracker: not a plan to build a product, but a page that worked well enough on one real trip that it was worth rebuilding properly — multi-trip, multi-activity, real accounts, a live page for people following along at home, and everything else that a one-off page for one trip never needed to have.

The Scottish Highlands Traverse trip you can see in the live demo is seeded from this exact route — the same eight days, the same distances and climbing, the same stops. It's the closest thing this app has to a founding trip.

If you're planning something similar — a multi-day trip with more than one person and more moving parts than a single note can hold — that's exactly what this app is for now. It just happens to have started as three cyclists trying not to lose each other in the Highlands.