Travel

The tickets are booked; the questions left are the ones no timetable answers: which side of the train gets the sun, what time it will be when you land, when the sun sets at the other end. Travel gathers the tools that answer them, free and without an account, in the order a trip unfolds: from the seat to the countdown.

Pick the seat by the sun and by the view

Give which side to sit on two cities, a departure time and the way you travel (train, bus, car, plane or ferry), and it says which side the sun will be on and where to sit for shade; name a landmark and it adds the window it will be behind. Forum answers were right for the hour someone else left, and I put more faith in one computed for your own departure than in any of them. Where the line bends, name a town it passes through: the Tokaido line from Tokyo to Kyoto runs south of Mount Fuji, through Shizuoka.

The time at the other end

What time is it in any city converts a moment between two places and says when the clocks there last changed, which is what most one-hour mistakes come down to. The seat tool writes your arrival on the arrival place’s clock.

The light where you are going

The golden hour calculator gives every day of this month or the next at your destination, in its local time: sunrise, sunset, both golden hours, the blue hour. One day of the trip adds the sunrise and sunset bearings, which tell you which side of the valley to stand on. What colour is the sky names the light at any moment on the city’s clock.

Places to see, located and lined up

Paste the stops of an itinerary into the latitude and longitude finder, one per line, and each comes back with its coordinates, in the order you typed; it knows places, not street addresses. The Sun and Moon alignment planner opens on the famous alignments, Manhattanhenge, the midsummer sunrise at Stonehenge, Abu Simbel, and gives their dates over the next twelve months.

Moonlit nights, and the countdown to departure

The moon phase calendar gives each night of this month or the next at your destination, with the phase, the share of the disc lit, moonrise and moonset. The countdown card maker counts the days to departure and draws them as a card to post; its embed recounts each time a page loads it.

What you take with you

The seat answer comes as a card of the vehicle seen from above, made for whoever books the seats, and the trip goes into your calendar with the advice as its title. The countdown offers a calendar subscription too. The seat tool draws the route as a great circle, exact for a plane and approximate for a railway that follows a valley, and it knows nothing of tunnels or seat numbering.

Questions

Are these vacation planning tools free?

Yes, with no account. The places and times you type are used for the computation and dropped; the link to a seat or sky answer carries them, so it recomputes when a travel companion opens it.

Which side of the plane sees Mount Fuji?

The seat tool has the Singapore to Tokyo flight ready to load, with Mount Fuji as the landmark: the answer names the window it will be behind when the flight passes closest.