DITL will start tomorrow . . .
I didn’t really track anything too specifically yesterday, so I’ll have to start this tomorrow (with today’s events). It’s funny, whenever I go to do this the week never seems “representative” enough but I think that’s just because every week does have its quirks!
(And that is definitely a good thing, life would probably be very monotonous otherwise.)
NEW HAMPSHIRE RECS + Using AI for Travel Planning
Okay, I’m pretty sure I asked for these a year ago (and I found some good stuff in the comments of this post!), but: we are planning to spend about a week up in the North Conway area in June and I need ideas. I have lodging booked, but that’s it! I’m thinking we will fly into Boston (because it’s a direct flight) and drive from there. Part of me feels like we need to add an additional destination but every time we split a vacation into two parts we seem to regret doing it, often feeling like it takes away from the relaxation vibe we are trying to cultivate on vacation.
I *did* already ask ChatGPT for its input, and I have to say: generating vacation ideas is a really good use of that tool (THOUGH IT DID TELL US TO GET ICE CREAM AT A PET STORE). But I would love to hear real-person recs, too.
Here is a sample of GPT’s itinerary:
I mean, pretty good start, right? I’d want to verify everything, but . . . I have to say I love this as a first step. I also asked it where to go for spring break next year (putting in desire for nature, kid-friendly, good weather, and a budget) and it came up with Sedona AZ at the #1 pick which was pretty wild since that was kind of what I was leaning towards anyway (!).
(other destinations that came up were Puerto Rico, Asheville, San Diego, and Costa Rica!)
ALLLL that said I can see how this could maybe . . . lead to a lot people going to the same destinations, if the algorithms seemed to favor some vs others? Chat GPT would only be free of bias if the internet were free of bias (but then again, my brain is not going to be free of bias either, and I’d probably be searching around the same places that GPT did). Hmm. I think I will stick to using AI for initial idea screening for now and take all recs with a grain of salt lest I end up trying to order a waffle cone at a pet shop . . .
How are you using AI in everyday life . . . or not?
(I am also terrified of all of it so please do not take the light tone in this post to think otherwise. But I didn’t think it would hurt anything to try it out with this kind of task!)
37 Comments
Flatbread Company is a great, kid-friendly lunch or dinner option in North Conway! For an activity, maybe a mountain coaster like https://cranmore.com/mountain-adventure-park which would be different than anything you’d have in FL.
I use an AI meal-planning app called Ollie, and I love it! You can ask it for recipes containing certain ingredients or fitting a certain diet plan. It will also adjust the recipes if you don’t like a specific ingredient or whatever you ask it to change. The recipes are very easy and all tasty so far. And it generates a picture for each, which makes them more appealing. It can do the grocery lists too, but I haven’t used that piece yet.
Sarah, I had AI develop a morning routine. I was specific with what I need to fit in and the times each task takes. It was very on point.
Oh I use it loads as an academic while simultaneously feeling existential dread about the number of gen AI essays I get and what that means for their learning. I use it for stuff that a 1950s prof would have gotten their wife/research assistant to do. Cutting word counts, putting things into charts, basic data analysis, reformatting references to the right style, checking my instructions to students are clear, combining multiple slide decks into one lecture and identifying what needs updates, generating scenarios or simulations for seminar activities, transcribing text from archival images. Sometimes for giving students a steer with literatures I’m not familiar with. I pay for it and it probably saves me 2-4 hours a week, depending what I’m up to. When I’m doing archival work, it cuts my time in half.
I second Flatbread Company as a good place to eat. It can be fun to take one of the gondola rides up the mountain. I think my family used to go to Loon Mountain. I just looked it up and they have other activities in the summer as well. There are also various train rides you can take from the center of North Conway. Honestly, it’s so pretty you can’t go wrong just wandering around. Meredith, NH is also fun if you want a little afternoon trip. They have lots of shops and such. They also have Harts Turkey farm if you like turkey dinners.
We stayed in Flagstaff this spring break. It was an awesome home base to get to the Grand Canyon, skiing in Flagstaff, Sedona, and Walnut Canyon, Petrified Forest Nat’l Park. Kids Ski free in Flagstaff at the Arizona Snow Bowl. It was awesome and definitely budget friendly.
Thanks for the reminder! My blogging friend Kyria wrote about using AI for trip ideas a while back, and I’d forgotten about it. I went to Annapolis a few weeks ago, so I asked it for a day trip and it gave me most of the things that I had done plus a few others that I would have done if I’d known about them. Then I asked it for ideas for Put in Bay, which is a island in Ohio (yes we have those), and it’s a place that I’m more familiar with and I was less impressed with the results. It listed the same place twice under different names, and the order of things didn’t make much sense. But still, it’s an interesting tool to use.
The company that I work for is very big on encouraging us to use AI. I see their point, but also they’re coming on way too strong with it. At our last company meeting our CEO did a 20 minute, very impassioned, and very rambly speech with a lot of f bombs about how important it is for us to use AI whenever we can. So honestly anytime I hear something about AI my association now is with his very bizarre behavior.
Ezra Klein did a great episode on this a couple of months back: “how should I be using AI right now”. It was the best description of exactly that subject that I’ve heard to date:
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000651164959
Santa’s village is close and very fun, kid friendly water park and amusement park. It is clean and has some fun rides for everyone and the water park is great. I know you don’t celebrate Christmas but it’s something to consider. Your kids are too old for storyland. There are also covered bridges nearby didn’t look closely at what chat gpt recommended
Christmas in June could be fun 🙂
I will second Santa’s Village! We go every year (I live in NH; I’ll give more recommendations in a separate comment). They play Christmas music throughout the park, which I think you like? They also have a water park, which I haven’t experienced and might be too cold for you in early June in northern NH. Also make sure you get the Doe-nuts, which are the most delicious cinnamon sugar doughnut holes. The snacks are good but the lunch food is subpar, so we usually bring in our own meal, which is allowed. You might want to buy your tickets ahead of time as they sometimes sell out, although I don’t think early June will be crazy.
Totally understand that it can help with things like this and what commenters mentioned, but I have way too many concerns – environmental, privacy, making the wealthy wealthier, copyright violations, labour violations, impact on the arts, and just our brains in general! So I don’t use it.
I have somehow made it 42 years without it, so I’m content to either miss it or be a late adopter if I have no other choice.
I totally understand. I have a lot of worry about it for all of the reasons you mentioned.
I’m an academic, and I’ve started to use if for some tasks – things like making a schedule/plan for a larger project (it will break tasks into chunks and allocate them to weeks etc), explaining a new concept to me (nothing too niche though, it can’t handle that!), condensing or improving readability of text (it really is good at this), troubleshooting code (to run stats etc). Basically its good for getting started on something, or for refining something (NOT for the intellectual heavy lifting of course). I always have to check everything though as it will very confidently make mistakes (like recommending ice cream from a pet store!), but for simple things it truly does save time.
I used AI to plan the Ireland trip for this summer. I did have to ask it to make the trip more leisurely because ChatGPT had us going HARD all day every day with one day in each city and I’d prefer to chill more than that.
I also use ChatGPT to polish my, um, tone for my professional emails. It inserts the butt kissing I can’t bear to write myself and hasn’t let me down yet. Highly recommend!
Also, my project coordinator went off grid camping in the white mountains last summer and raved about the experience, if you are looking for that kind of adventure. Personally I like sleeping in a bed, but maybe you could find a cabin situation for your family.
Oh I def require a real bed 🙂 the others might like that (3/5 anyway)!
Also Dylan uses AI for cookie recipes… just saying. I’m gonna stop commenting now.
I used the Google AI to give me a list of books written by a comedian last week. Not a single author listed matched the book they were listed with. It was BAD.
I’m not huge into AI but I’m usually a late adopter for technology.
We did an east coast trip last August (Boston, NH, & ME) and these were a couple things we really enjoyed in that area:
https://ciderconh.com/ – we all really liked the food, even the 7 y/o. It was a beautiful evening and we wished we’d made our reservation for outside as the outdoor seating looked lovely.
https://www.nhstateparks.org/find-parks-trails/flume-gorge – this was an easy enough hike that the 7 y/o and 71 y/o grandma could both handle it and very cool.
For Diana’s Baths I’d recommend going early AM. We tried to go mid morning and the parking was totally full.
I second the recommendation for Santa’s Village. If the weather is warm the week you are there, I recommend the Saco River tubing. You basically just gently float down the river in an inner tube, no impact at all. It is one of the most relaxing things I have done and my kids loved it.
My boys and I just came home from a mini trip to North Conway! I 100% recommend Cranmore adventure park, Santa’s Village (farther away, 1 hr ish) and Storyland (very close). Tuckermans Brewing has great food. Definitely check out Diana’s Baths, Cathedral Ledge, and Echo Lake (buy passes to Echo Lake ahead of time). Also about an hour away is Funspot- the world’s biggest arcade. It has newer games but also tons of retro games, pinball, and arcade games from our childhoods. Plus it uses old-school tokens and tickets instead of scan cards which was super fun!
I use ChatGPT all the time, but FWIW, it’s not really designed to give up-to-the-minute answers that it could only find on the internet. The newer models seem to have some internet-search capabilities, but they do get “locked” at the point of training, and will make up an answer (like eatlng lunch at a pet store) if it doesn’t know the answer. It’s like an enthusiastic intern. Helpful, but you always want to double check 🙂
You could also try Perplexity, which is an AI that’s specifically trained for web search. For example, if I wanted find options for a breakfast place with vegan options that’s half way between Orlando and Jacksonville and is dog-friendly I would use Perplexity vs ChatGPT. Not an ad, just comparing the two.
It’s very good for coding questions. If I just want to remember something very specific like how to change the x-axis tick labels in Plotly Express I can ask it rather than doing an internet search. It’s also great for trouble shooting errors. Instead of banging your head against a wall trying to find the problem you can just say, why is this code producing this error, and it will tell you. Soooooo much time saved!
And I do hope that, in the future, there will be a model where AI services compensate writers and artists whose work they use. I mean, we figured out how to sell digital music. We can figure this out.
We go to Conway every year and love it – another vote for Flatbread Company and highly recommend an extended hike from Echo Lake – there are a lot of options depending on how much you want to push, views are amazing. If you are staying in an Airbnb, go to Market Basket (New Englanders know!) for groceries and just grill out at home and then go to Peach’s or Stairway Cafe for breakfast that day.
Also becoming fan of AI despite working in corporate communications – I use it to plan my workouts, time my baby’s wake windows, count calories, prep for interviews, edit things I’ve written…and I admit I love that Google searches provide AI summary overviews, too!
For your NH adventure, I would suggest taking the COG up Mount Washington!
https://www.thecog.com/
My kids were younger when we did it, but both really enjoyed it! Not only do you get a train ride, you also get to see the environment change as you head up the highest peak in the North East without the strenuous hike! The Mount Washington observatory offers some very cool sites on a clear day and is just neat to explore in general!
I also recommend the Cog! Be sure to bring layers of clothes—the weather on Mount Washington is famously unpredictable.
I do enjoy travel planning so I’m not sure I’d want AI to do it for me, but I did once enter in a prompt to plan a trip that we had just taken (the Utah national parks) and it didn’t do a terrible job. I do think with my additional research I discovered some more off the beaten path places though! Also, for planning my upcoming Costa Rica trip I’m almost exclusively using Kae’s blog which is way better than AI 🙂 🙂 🙂 but that only works for trips Kae has done!
I second the tubing rec which is really fun in that area. Also, we loved the Lonesome Lake hike in Franconia Notch–that’s maybe an hour or so from North Conway, not sure how far out of that area you want to venture. It’s not super long (3ish miles), a fair amount of elevation change, but we did it when my kids were 6 and 7, so around G’s age–I think your kids would do fine.
I totally get not wanting to split a vacation up into multiple destinations (do you only have one week?) but if you’re going to fly in and out of Boston one option would be to do a city day in Boston and one night there on your way in or out!
I recently used chat gpt to come up with a plan to rehab and return to running after tendonitis. It was really helpful. I also read a lot about the injury generally on the internet and its answers seemed good. I liked that I could respond to it with specifics, like for example, I want to still go to barre class, is that okay? and it would respond with pretty nuanced answers. I also read on reddit recently about a person who used chatgpt as a running coach by inputting the details of every run he did and how he felt as the training progressed. I think that’s pretty cool. It does make me sad though to think that its replacing interactions with real people.
I live in NH and I think you’ll have a great visit here!
Diana’s Baths is nice but as others have said it can get really busy. Also for this and for Echo Lake be warned that the water will be pretty cold, if you were thinking of swimming. Pack warmer clothes than you think you will need and plan to layer. When the sun goes down, especially up north, it can get pretty chilly.
Franconia, Bethlehem, and Littleton are really cute towns. The top of the state is pretty narrow so it’s not a far drive to most places. Super Secret Ice Cream Shop in Bethlehem is amazing—they have just been nominated for their second James Beard Award and they have fantastic, unique flavors. Moat Mountain Brewery in Conway is a great pub-style place with craft beer. Downtown Littleton has great shopping and food—Schilling’s is another great pub-style craft brewery. Polly’s Pancake Parlor in Sugar Hill is adorable and also one of my favorite breakfast places anywhere—it can get very busy so I would recommend going early and maybe middle of the week instead of the weekend. Lots of different pancake batters and add-ins, plus delicious cheesy potatoes!
wait is Polly’s not that far? That was MY FAVORITE as a kid!!!!!!!!!!! We are soooo there if we can get there.
Weeelll I looked it up and it’s about an hour’s drive, so not super close, but worth it as you know!! Plus lots of other fun things to do in that area 🙂
Oh I will totally drive an hour for that bc I have so many fond childhood memories 😊
Sarah, check out Tyler Place. It’s very hard to get a reservation because families from the previous year get first dibs (and most come back). But it’s an actual vacation (not trip) for everyone, including you. The reviews are not kidding!
Oh yes this came up in BOBW patreon! I feel like I might be a little bit past peak kid ages for this? But it sounds amazing!
I use ChatGPT for so many things! We’re able to use this at work, so I love using it to review and adjust emails for me, and sometimes to help me figure out how to do some techy things that I would spend too much time on Google trying to figure out, lol. It’s also come in handy for trip planning, too! And sometimes I’ll just tell it some of the ingredients I have at home and ask it to plan my dinner, HA. It’s a helpful little resource!
Hi Sarah, Meant to send recs earlier, but I was actually on vacation IN North Conway when you posted this. My kiddos are older now (23 and 21), but we have had a condo in the area for 10+ years. In no particular order.
1. Zeb’s General Store
2. Birch Book’s (indie book store)
3. Sunrise Shack!
4. Chef’s Bistro
5. The Local Grocer
6. Be Well Yoga Studio
7. Spa @ Mt. Washington Hotel (for you 🙂
8. New England Ski Museum (quick, small, free, near playground, kids can play and you can pop in)
9. White Mt Cider Co – for dinner or donuts
10. Grants Shop & Save for groceries if you don’t need a big haul. Smaller, local, and more pleasant than a huge market.
My advice for any restaurants would be to call and check hours. Covid turned some things upside down, so random ‘Closed on Tuesday’s’ stuff.
I grabbed a pile of paper brochures and tourist maps for you. Send me an email, if you want me to mail them.
Happy to share hike suggestions too.
Happy planning!
Kara
oh WOW! I will email you. Love the idea of checking out the local yoga studio!!!! and did not know about that bookstore!