With quite a bit of downtime on our recent trip to Alaska—where we sat for 6 days in King Salmon hoping the weather would allow for a flight into the infamous Aniakchak Crater—we took a few unscripted moments to discuss some of the sacrifices we make in order to travel.
A few takeaways:
A life of travel often requires sacrificing on spending in other parts of your life.
Splitting costs is a great way to save on expensive travel costs. It might even be worth sleeping in a bunkbed in the living room or having your friend walk thru your bedroom to use the bathroom.
Planning ahead, such as packing food to cook at an expensive destination known for expensive meals, is a great way to stretch your travel budget.
Travel is rarely as sexy as what you see on social media. You rarely see the cheap meals, the long days, or the boring downtime spent waiting.
This post is primarily a screencast tutorial on how to create a custom google map of places you want to visit—or what I like to call an Adventure Map.
An Adventure Map is a handy repository for all of those places on your OMG-I-Want-to-Visit list. It’s a place to store those random campsite tips you get from friends, that instagram post about a backcountry waterfall, or that killer hike your friend just posted on facebook. There are plenty of ways to save this information for later, but I find that a custom map is one of the most useful.
The screencast tutorial
In this tutorial, I show you my personal Adventure Map and explain how I use it. I then teach you how to create your own adventure map. The entire screencast lasts about 27 minutes. If you’re in a rush, the tutorial itself starts at the 8:30 mark. I’ve also added some additional notes below that I didn’t mention in the screencast, as well as another short tutorial on how to load your new Adventure Map onto your mobile phone.
Even if you’ve used Google’s My Maps before, I hope there some nuggets that can you can put to good use. If you have additional tips, please leave them in the comments.
Thanks for watching. It’s quite a bit longer than I would have liked, and I’m not particularly happy with my performance, but I hope you found it useful. Below are some items I didn’t mention in the screencast that you might want to know about.
Additional notes not mentioned in the tutorial
Other ways to add pins
You can also add pins by clicking on the pin icon in the toolbar and clicking directly on the map. This is especially useful if you’re setting pins to investigate on the ground later, like possible indian ruins or dispersed camping sites. In addition, you can also search for a location by gps coordinates, which makes it easy to add destinations that you might have found from blogs, guide books, or someone else’s custom map.
More on driving, biking, and walking directions
Another method to add driving directions is to click the draw a line tool and select the add a driving (or biking or walking) route from the drop-down menu. Then click where you want the route to start and trace the path you want to the directions to follow. Double click to end the route. This will create a new layer containing the directions. Using this tool, Google will calculate a route based on the roads in its database. So if you start your route 1/4 mile from a road, the directions instead start at the nearest point on the nearest road, and only follow roadways. Awkwardly, this is also the case with walking and biking directions, too. Nonetheless, this is still a useful method when you’re trying to force Google Maps directions to follow a particular route.
Drawing lines and shapes
You can also add lines and free-form shapes (using straight lines only) to your map. I find this to be useful when there’s an entire area I want to save for future investigation, such as a long wall of petroglyphs, or what appears from satellite view to be a complex of pueblo ruins. Select the draw a line tool, click to add the starting anchor point for the line, then move to where you want the second anchor point to be and click again. You can continue to add anchor points, creating a multiple angled line. When you’re done, double-click to lock it in.
Or, if you’re adding a shape, follow this same procedure around the edge of the area you want, being sure to end back at the first anchor point. Once you’ve saved your shape, you can go back and adjust the location of the corners or create a new corner by dragging the dimmed circle that’s midpoint on each line. Once you’ve saved your area, Google will calculate the perimeter distance and area for you.
If you’re trying to undo a line or shape, you can easily abort by clicking ESC on your keyboard. If you click ESC again, you’ll be returning to the default select mode where you can click to select items or drag to pan the map.
Measuring distances and areas
This tool functions similar to the one used to add line and shapes, except that it doesn’t add any permanent items to your map. Instead, it simply shows you the distance of the line, or the perimeter and area of a shape. One useful feature of this tool is that when you’re measuring distances, it keeps a running total using “mile markers” along the line path.
How to load your Adventure Map onto your phone
As mentioned in the screencast, one of the benefits of using a custom google map is that you can load it as the base map on Google Maps on your phone. Below is a brief tutorial on how that in iOS.
Here’s how to do the same thing on Android. Even better, the My Maps app for Android allows you to create and modify your custom maps directly from your device [edit: the app is no longer available in the play store, perhaps the functionality has been included in the Google Maps app?].
Child of mine
come as you grow
in youth you will learn the secret places
the cave behind the waterfall
the arms of the oak that hold you high
the stars so near on a desert ledge
the important places
and as with age you choose your own way
among the many faces of a busy world
may you always remember the path that leads back
back to the important places.
— Dad for Forest, 1986
This short poem inspired the excellent short film above. It’s a poignant re-telling of how the poem inspired a return trip, and it highlights the role that our public lands play in our collective lives. Of how those shared experiences—even ones separated by decades—can help make us feel at home and connected to the ones we care most about. Our important places help us create, and later relive, our cherished memories.
If you haven’t made it back to the important places of your life recently, maybe it’s time to change that.
The Wilderness Act turns 50 this year and this short video is a visually stunning way to celebrate some of our most treasured landscapes. We’re truly indebted to John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Also Leopold, and the countless other unsung advocates who fought tirelessly to preserve Wilderness for us all. What an amazing legacy to leave.
Here’s a great little video describing America’s National Conservation Lands, the system of special places I work to protect. To support the great people working hard to protect America’s natural and cultural heritage, please check out the Conservation Lands Foundation.
Professor Srikumar S. Rao discusses why you already have what you need to be happy. You just have to ditch the “if..then” mental construct of happiness and focus your attention on the process itself. I think he’s on to something, though his explanation of how to re-configure this mental challenge is a bit inadequate. You … Read more
