Enter Road Sorties
I built Road Sorties, a route planner for people who love the drive. A while back my family and I were driving a rental from Palisade, CO to Moab, UT. A helpful stranger told us to skip the highway and take Highway 128 instead — a quiet two-lane road that follows the Colorado River through the red rock. It was unforgettable, and we only found it by word of mouth. That stuck with me: why is there no good way to discover drives like that on your own? So I built Road Sorties.
It's a route planner that optimizes for the drive itself, not just the fastest way from A to B:
Scenic Roads — route through the most beautiful landscapes
Curvy Roads — chase the turns (it'll turn a boring highway into a serpentine mountain route)
Stops along the way — EV charging, fuel, rest areas, campgrounds, RV parks, lookouts — added with one tap and auto-ordered to keep the route efficient
Compare multiple route options on the map, with distances and times
Find places to stay along your route
Share a route with a link, or export to GPX/GeoJSON/JSON for your GPS or other apps
Use the navigation app to drive your routes
It's free, on the web and iOS. Under the hood: Valhalla routing on OpenStreetMap data, a FastAPI backend, and a SwiftUI app. I'd love feedback — especially on the scenic and curvy routing, and which roads it nails or misses near you.
Try it: https://roadsorties.com
What stood out to me is that you're not really helping people get somewhere.
You're helping them choose a different reason to travel there in the first place.
That feels meaningfully different from most navigation products.
Yes, exactly! It's a different goal altogether. Thanks for the feedback
Possibly.
I'd still be careful that the reason people say they're traveling somewhere and the reason they actually choose a destination aren't always the same thing.
That's where products like this can end up teaching founders something unexpected about user behavior.