my Favorite Tools, Guides, and Must-Haves for Expats, Travelers, and Pilots
Think of this as my bookshelf — the apps, gear, and guides that make expat life smoother, flying more fun and safe, family trips easier, and history come alive.
becoming dutchish
Parnterpete was essential for getting us set up for arrival in NL when we were stateside. They helped arrange housing, set up utilities, advise on schools… Takes a lot of the legwork out of navigating moving abroad.
Bikes. I don’t know if you heard. The Dutch use them. And if you have kids (and no car) a bakfiets is what you take them around in. It’s as essential in NL as the air you breathe. Qarqon is our brand. After 2 years, it still functions just as it should.
Did I mention bikes? Swapfiets is a bike share company that you can rent a bike for an extended period of time for a monthly fee. Amsterdam is notorious for bike theft, and if this one gets stolen, who cares? As long as you locked it up, it’s not on you.
TrustedHousesitters has been a lifesaver as a traveling family with a dog. Rather than board our dog for each trip, a vetted housesitter stays over. We don’t pay them for the sit, they don’t pay us for the accomodation, win, win. We haven’t had a (very) bad experience yet.
taking Flight
ForeFlight is a platform for flight planning and navigation. When you are fliying in 50 year old Cessnas without the bells and whistles, that’s a must. Works only with IOS, but the gold standard for GA pilots in the USA.
Safesky is a brilliant idea. It makes your phone into a transponder and broadcasts your position to other planes (and lets you see where others are); it then shows them on your map in ForeFlight or SkyDemon. Drawback: only works if you have cellular data. At 3,000+ feet, that gets iffy.
Very similar to ForeFlight, but SkyDemon designed in Europe and better for VFR pilots. The UI is more intuitive and it generally has a better look than ForeFlight with a lower learning curve. If you are flying VFR (and even more if in Europe), this is your navigation app.
Ahh Aerodynamics. Where I learned to fly. Beautiful Costa Del Sol, almost always nice weather, friendly staff and instructors. They are a machine though: in 40 hours I may have had 10 instructors, not what you want if you really want to dig in with a CFI that will get to know you.
Letters Home
Newspapers.com is an amazing resource for those interested in the past. Very easy to use, and a really cool way to uncover things you thought you’d never know. Thousands of digitized newspapers dating back hundreds of years. A history nerd’s dream.
No matter how great a researcher you think you are, sometimes you just hit a wall. Golden Arrow Research helped me dig into the Letters Home story and bring to light some details about my grandfather which I thought were lost to history. There’s more to know out there than you may think, and GAR can help you find it.
A passion project of a group of Italian friends. Combat Road has turned a hobby into a truly world class collection of WWII artifacts, and rolled out the red carpet when I visited in search of more information about my grandfather’s time spent in the mountains not far from this museum. An incredible find. Cheers CR.
Probably not many people realize how much free information is at their fingertips with NARA. In the world of Google and Chat GPT, you may think that an archive of information like this is obsolete, but it’s not so. I dare you to try it out. And if you are a nerd like me, there goes your afternoon.
Travel
Get Your Guide is our go-to platform for booking experiences while we travel. It’s a great way to get connected with local operators and experience places in ways you may have missed have you not checked it out. And with a well utlized reviews section, you don’t have to roll the dice on a terrible experience.
If you want to go a little deeper than a pre- organized tour, WithLocals connects you with locals that allow you to dig into a place exactly how you want to. Anything from making pizza at someone’s home to a 2 day personal tour around Egypt. And oh, hey! I’m a Withlocals guide! Hit me up if you are in Amsterdam.
I’m not known far and wide as the most organized person. TripIt helps me chronilogically organize every aspect of a trip in one place in an an easy to use app. Just forward over confirmation emails to add to your trip and share and collaborate with travel partners.
There are many reasons to use Surfshark from a data privacy standpoint, but my reason is simpler: USA Netflix. Ok it’s a little more than that – but this app lets you VPN as if you were in any part of the world to bypass regional restictions and carry your American-ness with you anywhere you go (use with caution).
