Using Google Maps to plan your itinerary

Initial planning with Google Maps Engine

When we were in the initial planning stage — we knew we were going to England, and had some ideas of what we would do there, but didn’t have the complete plan laid out — we bought a couple of travel books:

• Lonely Planet’s Discover Great Britain
• Cadogan Guides’s Take the Kids: England

We also got AAA’s TravelBook Europe, and, quite possibly the most helpful of all, Melinda joined the National Trust and received their 2014 Handbook. The National Trust is worthy of a separate blogpost. These books are not expensive, and while not wholly helpful (they cannot do your daily planning for you), flipping through them, we were able to get ideas of places to visit while in country.

To help in travel planning, we wanted to plot the places on a map, so we could identify clusters of places that we could visit on the same day. Initially, I had obtained a map of the United Kingdom from my local AAA store and we had thought to circle, flag, or somehow mark places of interest. However, the AAA map is very detailed and England very dense, so it proved difficult to make our marks stand out.

Google has an alternative to its standard Maps interface (maps.google.com) called Google Maps Engine, mapsengine.google.com. With Google Maps Engine, you can create custom maps, so I created one for our England trip, called “England 2014,” and we began plotting on it any place we came across that we might be interested in. Google Maps Engine is not a panacea; some of its pros and cons:

• It does allow you to create custom maps.
• You can mark different places of interest with different icons. We initially marked potential lodgings — this was before we had even decided where we would stay while in England — with a house-looking icon, and since I had some interest in historical battlegrounds, I marked them with an appropriate symbol, but the majority of our places marked were with the standard Google upside-down teardrop. The different icons did make it helpful to identify whether something was really a place of interest as opposed to a place to stay, and it helped us rule out Norfolk as a place to stay, despite our having found some very nice and historic accommodations there; we would have had nothing to do there.
• You cannot print! It would have been a whole lot more useful if we could have printed our resulting map, so Melinda and I could look through maps together and make marks on the paper. In the end, while we used the custom map to identify clusters of POA’s (places of interest), it was not a one-stop shop for trip planning.

Once we had used Google Maps Engine to help us decide where to stay, we then printed out a blank calendar and started penciling in where we would go and what we would do on specific days. This is where identifying the clusters on Google Maps Engine was helpful, but it did not substitute for the books and guides previously mentioned.

For example, we had an idea that on one day we would visit Bath. We actually hadn’t marked very many things in the vicinity of Bath on our map, so we referred to our books, which were generally arranged geographically, and identified Wells, Cheddar Gorge, Glastonbury Tor, and Glastonbury Abbey as places of interest in the vicinity of Bath. So we marked on our calendar for July 1, “Bath, Wells, Cheddar Gorge, Glastonbury Tor, Glastonbury Abbey.”

As an aside, being the nerd that I am, I had thought to create a spreadsheet with the travel times between each POA, and then possibly write a program to plan the ideal order for visiting our places. I abandoned that relatively early, though, for two reasons:

1. It was going to take longer to put the grid together and write the program than it would to just eyeball it.
2. It would have taken the fun and collaboration out of the planning. Part of the fun of traveling is planning it!

Route planning with Google Maps

Route planning is where Google Maps shines. Once we had decided where we would go on a particular day, I could plan our actual routes and print and save directions.

The Google Maps interface really makes it easy to add waypoints on the route and experiment with different orders of stops. For example, our aforementioned Bath day is probably our longest day. (Stonehenge day will also be a very long day.) I could experiment with different orders of hitting the places to find the best route.

When using the Chrome web browser, when you print through the browser’s print dialog, it gives you the option of saving the printout instead as a PDF to Google Docs (if you have an account and have logged into Chrome with the same account). So not only did I print all our routes, I also saved them as PDFs, which I then downloaded to my iPad for good measure. Google Maps also allows you to save your maps with routes and directions to a short, succinct URL.

Google Maps on the iPad

Planning and using Google Maps is best done on a real computer, not an iPad. On my iPad (which I use to compose this blog), I have the Google Maps app installed, but it tended to get in the way, since the web version of Google Maps, which has more features, kept wanting to jump me into the app. And even the web version that you see in the browser on the iPad is not as good as that on a real computer.

However, Google Maps for the iPad does allow you to save areas of maps offline. I have saved some areas of England to my iPad, and I am hopeful that that will come in handy as we’re navigating through the English countryside.