The journey is not the only reward. If you use Trip Journal along the way, you can be rewarded with your journey over and over again, as well as being able to share it with friends. Trip Journal by iqapps allows you to document trip experiences, including notes, photos, and waypoints, along with a map overlay showing your journey. Sometimes, it is not the destination that is the most interesting stop, but one of the points along the way.

I tried it out over the Thanksgiving holiday with a trip to Jack London State Park, a great but little-known place about 35 miles north of San Francisco in the wine country. I used my Nokia N97 mini for this particular adventure. The itinerary started at home, then on to a local coffee house, then a stop at the Golden Gate Bridge, then deep into wine country to stop at the fabulous Glen Ellen market that is near the entrance to the park, and then on to the Jack London museum and Wolf House that are part of the California state park.

After an initial screen in which I renamed the trip from Trip 002 to Jack London State Park, I saw the main screen for the trip, which has options to add waypoints as well as general notes and media.

Each waypoint also has the ability to associate a photo taken or notes made, so the bulk of my photos were waypoint-related.

Henry’s House of Coffee on Noriega St. near 22nd Ave. in San Francisco may not be as well-known a landmark as the Golden Gate Bridge, but it has been an important day-starter for the people of my neighborhood since 1966. After renaming waypoint #2 to Henry’s, I captured a photo of Henry himself by clicking on the Add Media icon and then the Take, Use, and Save Photo buttons. This associated the photo with the coffee house waypoint. I also turned on the Track Route option (the pawprint icon), so that the app would track my every movement via GPS positioning.

Then, it was on to the Golden Gate Bridge vista point, where I snapped photos of tourists snapping photos of each other with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. Several of these were added to the Golden Gate Bridge waypoint. By the time I was done, I had 10 waypoints, each with associated photos and comments. Clicking the waypoints icon on the main trip screen revealed a nice organization of the waypoints as shown below.

From the waypoint screen shown earlier I could add general notes about the waypoint, but I preferred adding them mainly in the form of captions for each photo. To do that I clicked on the waypoint in the list and saw the list of photos for that waypoint, such as the one shown below for the Jack London State Park waypoint.

I clicked on one of the Wolf House photos and that allowed me to add the caption shown below.

Clicking on the photo within the frame brings the photo itself to full frame, such as the picture of Henry shown above.

Finally, both the day and the trip were done. I clicked on Trip View on the main Trip screen, and it showed me what the GPS tracking of my trip had recorded, as superimposed upon a map of the San Francisco and Marin counties. The red lines were the parts of my trip for which the tracking was turned on, and the black line was the portion of the trip for which the tracking was turned off.

Trip Journal is integrated with Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, so that you can post your trip for others to see. Click on Trip Admin and then Share, and you can e-mail it to yourself and friends as a KMZ file that can be read by Google Earth.

Overall, I found that Trip Journal was a great way to keep my photos and notes of the trip in an organized, easily-retrievable fashion. I rate it a good value at its $2.99 (USD) price on Ovi Store.

For a detailed, interactive video of my use of Trip Journal, click on the Tutorials tab above and then click on the Trip Journal icon.

Trip Journal is available in Ovi Store, and it is compatible with the Nokia devices listed below.