FAQ

It's an iPhone app: an audio tour guide for road trips. It keeps track of where you are, works out what you're about to pass, and tells you about it out loud while you drive.

No. There's no route to enter and no trip to set up. You press Start Tour and drive. The app looks about three minutes ahead on the road you're actually on and finds what's coming. A cross-country trip and your daily commute work the same way.

Three places. We research and write stops ourselves, and we add more every week. We import public archives, starting with state historical records. And Wikipedia covers the rest, which is what makes the coverage national instead of a list of famous places. Whichever one a place came from, the story you hear is written for the moment you hear it rather than read out word for word, and every stop links back to its source.

Mostly, but don't treat them as authoritative. The records underneath are written by other people and are sometimes wrong, and the retelling is generated, which can add its own mistakes. If a date, a name, or a claim matters to you, check it. Every stop has a Source link to where it came from, and telling us about a bad one really does help.

Whatever the place is actually known for. Often that's a bridge, a battle, a stretch of geology, or an old hotel. But this is real history, and a lot of American history is violent and ugly. Massacres, lynchings, prisons, and disasters are all on the map, and they come up like anything else. Nothing filters them out or softens them. Worth knowing before you start a tour with kids in the car.

Partly. The stops we write ourselves are stored in the app, so those still work with no connection. Everything else needs one, and so does writing and speaking a story. In a real dead zone the app goes quiet and picks back up when you have service again.

Your music or podcast dips while a story plays and comes back when it finishes. Navigation keeps running underneath, and the tour keeps going while you're in Maps or while your screen is off. That's what the background location permission is for.

Press next-track on your lock screen, or tap Skip on the card.

Yes, both are in Settings. There are nine voices. Changing voice changes how the guide sounds, not what it says. A Focus setting (Everything, History, Nature, or Family) steers which places get picked and which side of the story gets told. Pacing (Chatty, Balanced, or Relaxed) sets how much quiet sits between stops.

No. There is no recording code in the app and it never asks for microphone permission. Nothing said in your car is captured, processed, or sent anywhere.

The app is free to download, and the map is free to read: you can see the places around you and what they are called without paying anything. Hearing them is what costs. Your first 15 stops are on us, which is about forty-five minutes of real driving and enough to know whether you want this. After that, Road Tripper is $9.99 a month, for up to 750 guided stops a month. Cancel any time. There are no ads, and no account to make; Apple handles the payment and we never see your card.

One thing said out loud: a landmark announced as you pass it, a place you tapped on the map, or a description of the area you're driving through. The line that opens a tour is free and never counted. Seeing a place on the map, reading its name, or skipping a story costs nothing either. Only what you actually hear.

An iPhone running iOS 17 or later. There's no Android version, and no iPad or CarPlay app yet. It plays through your car the way any audio app does, over Bluetooth or a cable.

Send it to us. We add our own stops one at a time, and a lot of them started as somebody's tip. The address is support@whistlestop.guide.