At home you have your walking route all planned out. You know where your going, how long it’s going to take and how far you will go. But now your on vacation or traveling away on business. Your in a new city and unfamiliar with your surroundings. You don’t want to hang up your walking gear for the duration of your stay. What do you do? You could just head out and “play it ear” without any idea of where or how far you’re going but that’s difficult at best. But hold on there is a better way….Google Maps.

Google Maps enables you to plot out a walking route around your current location and calculate its’ millage. It gives you a street level view of route enabling you to avoid potentially troublesome areas and provide you with landmarks along the way. You can email or print it, even create a hyperlink.
 

How do you take advantage of this great walking aid? Lets take it step by step. First get a Google account if you don’t already have one. Next sign in and get into the Google Maps application. Put the full address of the starting point of your walk in the box at the top of the page. The click on “search maps”. That will bring you to a closeup map of the location, identified by a red balloon.

At this point you can begin creating your customized walking route map. Start by clicking on “My Maps” in the upper left. Then click “create a new map”. Give it a name and description. You can make it public or private as you wish. Next locate the three symbols at the upper left hand corner of the map. They are a hand, a balloon and a crooked line, The hand is used to move the map about and the last two are used to create your route. Click on the blue balloon which will create a placemark and then click on or near the red balloon. This will set a reference point to which you can return if needed. Next step is to hover over the crooked line and select “draw line along roads”. A cross hair will appear. Place the cross hair near your blue placemark and click. This creates you starting point. Slowly move the cross hair along a particular route that looks appealing. When you get to you first four way intersection click again. A second small circle along with a box will appear. You’ll see a distance number appear inside the box. Continue to move the cross hair slowly along the streets you are considering walking. You’ll see the distance number changing as you do. Continue on until you have reached about half your targeted walking distance and click again. Another small circle will appear. Now you can begin to plot your way back to your starting point. Once you’ve return click again and hit “Done” to the left of the map and your finished.
 

The Google Maps application is designed to plot the shortest route, so it may automatically try to change your route along the way. If you don’t want it to re-plot just click at the point where it starts its’ re-plotting process. That will establish another set point (small circle) and you can go on from there. Using it may take a bit of getting use to but with a little practice you’ll be able to get your routes planned and plotted quickly and effortlessly.

Once you’ve got your route saved you can then examine it in detail from street level view, a satellite view, get an idea of terrain, email, print it or create a hyperlink. Google Maps is really an amazing and highly useful piece of software that should take it’s place alongside your shoes, socks and other pieces of walking equipment.

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