Inspire your journey with travel tech

— -- Hopping on a plane or embarking on a road trip can be an exciting experience. And then there are delays, layovers and general boredom. No worries, here comes technology to the rescue.

OnTheWay

People often romanticize the wide open road. In reality, after the first hour or so, road trips get awfully boring. Next time you're planning a road trip, consult OnTheWay, a travel website that will help you pinpoint interesting sights, eateries and activities along the way to your destination. Using the site is a piece of cake. After inputting the start and end points (and any other pit stops), you choose a route. OnTheWay finds potential stops on each leg of the trip. Depending how desolate the area, it might recommend a sea of fast food joints. But for the route from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, it also found some gems, including a farmer's market. These stopping points are sourced with data from Foursquare, Yelp, Google Places and Lonely Planet. You can add these locations to your trip to create custom maps for your next road trip.

Around the world

Sometimes all the inspiration you need to trot across the globe with only an overstuffed backpack is beautiful imagery from someone who has done so himself. Case in point: After quitting his job as a strategist at a financial firm, Kien Lam backpacked the world in about a year. Armed with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF-1, a couple of wide-angle lenses and a flimsy tripod, he took more than 10,000 time lapse shots and another 15,000 photos and videos. He condensed the memories of his 343-day excursion across 17 countries on five continents to a mere five minutes. (The end product comprises 6,200 photos.) Each scene in the video, approximately two seconds long, is made of about 40 to 60 shots. To learn more about this stunning and inspiring project, check out Lam's website at http://kienlam.net/around-the-world. Warning: Doing so might lead to you quit your job in search for amazing adventures.

Self-powering suitcase

Suitcases aren't just for lugging around your belongings anymore. An innovative luggage design concept from designer Jung Inyoung can actually power your gadgets using kinetics. Travelers know airports have a short supply of outlets. This suitcase is perfect for the dreaded layover or delayed flight. When the wheels of the hard-shell suitcase spin, its gears accrue and store power in a portable battery, which devices can plug into. An LED indicator on the outside of the suitcase shows how much remaining power there is. It likely won't charge up everything to 100%, but it'll give you the extra kick to get a bit of work done, or at least update your Facebook status. ("What a surprise: layover at ORD") For now, this is only a concept, but I'm sure frequent fliers would love to see this come to market.

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