As we’re starting to plan our route back to Maryland for Christmas, I’m using Weather Underground’s Trip Planner tool to check out what the average lows are where we might want to camp.

This tool is wicked handy, and it took me awhile to come across it.

You might have searched before for weather at a certain place at a given time of year, maybe found the average temp, but this is waaay nicer, and unfortunately gets beat out in search listings by a lot of SEO happy, but much less useful sites that are chocked full of ads.

So how it works, is you give it a location and a date span, up to a couple weeks, and not only does it tell you the averages, but it tells you likelihood of hot or cold temps, precip and cloudy/sunny days. This is a lot more useful, since the average being 75 doesn’t help you much if you’re there when a cold front comes through and its high 40.

While it can’t predict when those swings will occur, it gives you a much better idea of whether the weather is stable, or whether it can vary pretty widely, and what the odds are you’ll have nice weather.  Check it out!