When you live in Vancouver and you’re a baseball fan it’s rare you get to see your ‘home’ team play a live game… and if you’re a Blue Jays fan (like I am)  it seems even harder! Last month we joined the herds of Vancouverites heading down to see the Toronto Blue Jays take on the Seattle Mariners. We cruised on down in the 2017 Corolla XSE Sedan in the prettiest red. The Corolla went through a complete redesign in 2014 and the new model is gorgeous! I wanted to share with you my five all-time must-have apps that made it an easy, FUN and cost-effective road-trip!

Dashboard DJ

Gary and I love listening to music on road trips. I think it’s truly what makes a road trip, a road trip! I play DJ and we take turns requesting songs or sharing our favorite playlists. We use Spotify to stream our tunes—it lets us discover new music too! We do this for all our local trips but of course, roaming charges come into play the minute you cross that border! Telus offers Easy Roam which allows you to travel to the US (and 100 other countries) where you pay $7/day to access the voice minutes, text messages, and data included in your smartphone or tablet plan, instead of incurring roaming charges. We’re free to karaoke our way through the evergreen.

Navigational Wizard

If you’re like me, you practically live on Google Maps. I use it every day and almost every single time I hit the road even if I know exactly where I’m going. Why? It’s great at telling me the bridge is totally backed up, border lines are atrocious or that my meet-up time at Safeco Field is set back 10-20 minutes. While I use it for the obvious navigation system, I especially love it on road trips for finding the nearest gas station. You’d be surprised just how quickly panic can set in when you’ve dropped into the red and the last three exits haven’t mentioned a gas station… Thank goodness our rental car had TSS (Toyota Safety Sense) to make me feel safe, no matter what situations we got ourselves into.  

Friendly Encounters

One of the best feelings in the world is arriving to the stadium decked in your face paint and Jays gear to find everyone else sharing the same spirit. The only time you’re actually excited to see that you’re wearing the same outfit as someone else! The hard part is actually finding your friends in the sea of blue! Another great benefit to having Easy Roam is the accessibility to your network—you can access your regular voice minutes, text as you would at home  and with the included data you can use communication apps like whatsapp! It’s a great universal (android and iPhone alike) way to connect. Meet-up, pre-game, tailgate or morning after with your crew no matter what part of the city you happen to wake up in! Thank goodness for easy communication, it got my friends and I to the Cheesecake Factory, which is one of our US faves.

Good Eats

If you haven’t spent much time in Seattle, you’ll want to try some of the amazing restaurants this city has to offer. The best way to do that is with TripAdvisor! You can see just how close you are to top rated restaurants, check out their menus and their price points. I find this most helpful when you’re strolling through the city and don’t have a lot of time to research restaurants you want to go to. You can rely on a network of people who’ve rated the restaurant already! Easy Roam let’s you use your data as you would normally and  you don’t have to worry about turning your data roaming on and off for quick bursts of internet use! We used it to find “The Walrus and The Carpenter” on Friday evening, which we will definitely be going back to!

Peaceful Sleep

I’m pretty obsessed with Hotel Tonight. It let’s you roll into a new city and get a killer rate on an otherwise expensive hotel. This app finds the hotels with vacancies after 4pm and let’s you book same-day with a deep last minute discount. I especially love this when you’re coming into town late (or because the delay at the border meant you went straight to the field) and now it’s 10pm and you need a place to crash—you can quickly jump on the app (Easy Roam so you can use your data) and pick the hotel that suits you and your team’s budget! This time we ended up staying at The W, which is a trendy downtown Seattle Hotel, a coins toss (or baseballs toss) from Safeco Field. It was also dangerously close to Cowgirls, which we may have enjoyed a drink or two at on Saturday night.

Gary and I stopped into the Seattle Nordstrom rack (as if I don’t go to Vancouver Nordstrom enough already) where I picked up the cutest little white, eyelet, summer dress and some killer sunglasses that were about 75% off (so practically free right?)  and cruised by Wakefields after for the BEST Moscow Mule I’ve ever had.

We had a very busy weekend going to every game; Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon but I was very thankful to have my sidekick (aka my phone) to keep us organized and on-schedule. On Sunday we had seats right behind the Jay’s dugout in row 2, and on Saturday night we were right behind home plate (if you follow me on instagram, i’m sure you saw our killer seats in my stories). I GUESS Gary did an ok job picking out our seats! 😉

Wherever your road-trip takes you, be sure to travel comfortably and with the tools necessary to have all the fun you deserve! If you’re looking for the perfect road trip car, I suggest the Corolla, I understand why it’s the world’s best selling vehicle of 2017.

If you have a must-have road-trip tip or a favorite travel app, or a Seattle favorite for that matter, share it in the comments below! Would love to hear from you guys!!!

Happy Travels,

n xx