Setting up a Rick Steves walking tour map on smart phone

Are any of the walks you plan to do on his audio app? We followed one from his app in London. We each wore one ear bud and could pause when we needed.

We have used the audio apps before but they don’t help you with navigation. It would be great if RS added smart phone navigation to their offerings.

For example we were in Chartre last year and got lost trying to switch between the guide book map page and the text. Too much trouble.

Okay, got it. I will keep checking here for other responses though as it could be helpful to myself and others.

I use PlotaRoute for some of our hikes. You simply plot your route (I do it on my PC so the map is easier to see during creation) and save it, then when you are walking you pull it up in navigation mode. I am not sure if the free version supports realtime navigation but the “pro” version is cheap.

Komoot also has navigation for hikes and walks in the app but I have not played with putting my own route in.

I haven’t tried this, but I have a couple of apps on my phone I used for running, where you input a route and it prompt you. I would assume you could do the exact same thing for a Rick Steves tour route

I just looked at RunGo and someone has actually mapped out of 7. Mile route that covers a lot of the big sites. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody hasn’t put Rick Steves in there I just couldn’t find it.

Last fall during the Paris and the Heart of France, we toured the Pere Lachaise cemetery.

We had two different paper maps, one downloaded from the cemetery’s website and the other from Rick Steves’ website and neither were detailed enough as there are thousands of gravesites, tombstones, and monuments. The RS map highlighted the graves Americans would most likely be interested in.

What finally worked best for us was using Google Maps in walk mode. We plugged in the name of the grave/tomb we were searching for, and the walking directions using longitude and latitude coordinates were spot on (turns, number of steps, directions, etc.).

If RS's map had longitude and latitude coordinates printed on it, that would worked in Google Maps walk even better.

What is good about Google Maps is you can tell which direction to walk in. If you are in a canyon of buildings you might see that the RS map wants you to walk south and then turn right. But you don't want to have to walk in a guessed direction and then backtrack when the GPS shows you are going wrong. The compass helps in that case.

I can set up routes for our expected walks and then email to my phone. Also Google has a map save feature so one would not need to be on cellular to use the route. Maybe this is best unless someone has already done the homework.

BTW, for hikes I use Alltrails which allows for downloading if you have the payed version on your phone. We will probably use this in Lake Como area and Cinque Terra and Capri for moderate length hikes.