3 Tips On How To Use Google My Maps for Planning An Awesome Road Trip

road trips are so fun planning your road trips however is sometimes not so fun can be a little bit arduous but don't worry there are some ways to make your planning much easier I'm Peter from car camping tips calm and in this video I'm gonna show you how you can use Google's my maps to make the planning for your trip both easy and awesome first though before we get to these tips the first question is what is Google my maps and why would I want to use it Google my maps is a tool used for creating custom maps and you can use it for a lot of different purposes and it's different than Google Maps the one that you're accustomed to using because it doesn't have you know your suggestions to go to this restaurant and it doesn't have reviews it is just shows very basic location information but it allows you to create these custom maps which is perfect for when you're planning a route for your road trip so there are three ways to access it that I'll go over if you ever forget how to get there you can just Google my maps it should be the first result in google.com slash my maps you can also just enter it into the address bar my Maps google.com and that will bring up all the maps that you've created it you're able to save those as you go and then you can also go directly to the URL if that's if you have a bookmark it's just Google comm slash my maps so either any of those ways will get you to Google my maps once you've gone to my maps you can now see your dashboard and you can click create a new map to get you started and create your custom map wherever you want to so the first tip to kick us off to make your trip awesome is layers now to explain why layers are so helpful let's start creating our trip plan and then you'll see very quickly why it can help us out a lot so let's say we're going to fly into Austin and we're going to begin our road trip there and we're going to stay the night in McKinney Falls State Park I just searched it in the bar and it came up with its details and since that helps us out a lot we don't have to add that in manually I'm just going to click Add to map great and then the next day we're going to go do some rock climbing so let's go to rain [Music] ranch climbing I think it's just there's no apostrophe apostrophe there we go Ramos climbing parking lot alright we're gonna add that to the map and then we let's do some paddleboarding let's go to Lady Bird Lake rentals and we see that there's quite a few options here let's go to how about Congress Avenue kayaks we'll add that to the map great and then maybe we'll do some floating in San Marcos so let's do San Marcos Park City Park cool hey there's even a tube rental let's add that to the map okay so this looks manageable and not too hard to deal with but imagine that instead of just a few of these locations imagine if we have dozens and this whole map is dotted with all the things that we want to do in a short period of time we haven't been to the area we're doing research we want to pick the route that's going to be the most fun and as you can see there's we have these random locations and we don't even know necessarily what they are like rhymers climbing parking lots I mean it has climbing in the name but maybe some of these locations aren't going to have the full description of what you want so in comes layers to the rescue now we can create another layer by clicking his add layer button and let's do climbing rock climbing and let's do another one paddle boarding kayaking and let's do this original layer let's rename this by clicking the Menu button click your name and let's do this camping slash hiking perfect now I can clot drag this from that one layer and let's move this around a little bit and now we have successfully separated the different activities and we can style these if we wanted to but now this will work great especially if you're planning a road trip with multiple people and not everyone likes to do the same thing for example I know I would totally dig rock climbing but not everyone in my group would so we can if someone if we wanted to invite others if we click this share button you can actually collaborate with others and they want to add things to the map rather than having this one big layer that everyone adds everything to you can have multiple layers so that the activities are separate and so the people who are interested in rock climbing can plan for that and the people who aren't don't have to they don't have to see it and usually you can uncheck that for example and let's say I'm checking paddle boarding so we can quickly be able to separate the different layers for your roadtrip awesome that will really help your trip stay a lot more organized tip 2 so I've gone ahead and added all the locations that I think we can fit into one roadtrip and I'm beginning to see that we have a lot on our list and that's kind of overwhelming we want to see everything on when we make our road trips and there's so much to see and it's impossible to see everything and so it becomes extremely important to prioritize your trip now there's ways you can do this you can do this in the name of the pin you can just edit the pin and say number one and go through the entire list and number them that way in priority but one easy way that we found that helped us as we've organized our trips is to just court prioritize and create some categories and then color code them so for example there's a couple locations that you will try to separate it into different categories such as I have to see this like I don't I will not feel satisfied with our trip if we don't see these so we call you can call that the must-see category and then there's the it'd be cool but I don't you know it's if we don't get to it that that's ok and then there's the yeah I mean if we're in the area might as well stop by so that's three different categories so what would love to see must-see and then you know could see it doesn't bother you either way so if you create these three categories and then you can quickly color code each of these and that will really help you to not your trip and let's say I definitely want to make it to enchanted rock and wants to pick that same color and let's say you heard utopia Park was just awesome okay great well these are the three look at camping locations that you definitely want to see and this kind of helps you set some expectations too because sometimes the place that you want to go to is closed for some reason due to weather or you know unforeseen reasons or you don't just have time to get to a certain location so now you have organized it in that okay if you don't get to go to the place that you really want to go you can now see there's other activities that are nearby that you can substitute and so really being able to prioritize these and color-code them can really help you to be more prepared for any eventuality that could happen on your trip now that you've put together all these places and you've categorized them by how much you want to see them things that you really just want you want to make sure that you get to now that you can you can start creating a route plan to help make your trip really come to life so I'm gonna start here at the Austin International Airport and let's create a driving route and so you can click on this route button or this draw a line button I should say and you can then do add driving route all right so if we let's hide that for now cool if we start at the Austin Bergstrom Airport and then we can add the next destination like okay well we're in we're in Austin let's go to the McKinney Falls State Park and it's on our list of things we definitely want to see so let's do that and let's zoom out so we can get a better picture of where we're gonna go so after we've stayed there that night we definitely want to go paddling that day so let's make sure and do that and let's click this golden one there we go alright so we're gonna go to the Austin paddle Shack and go paddling on later Lady Bird Lake oh and we figured that's going to take most of the most of the day and then we're gonna go up to let's go camping and Pedernales that day if we can get reservations awesome now the next day we're going to hit go rock climbing and so let's go to rhymers climbing rhymers ranch right rather there's a parking lot that you can start at and now that we've gotten to these through Austin let's go let's go to see what's next okay so we know that we definitely want to go to the Guadalupe River and we know we want to get to Enchanted Rock and and this is where this functionality really helps because now you can see okay these are significant driving distances and so let's let's try that let's go to and chanted rock the next day and we can now see the total distance that this is if we cook on the menu in the directions that I've clicked and do step by step and we've already seen we're already seeing that we have 155 miles and so that's already three hours of driving time and so that is really helpful for multiple reasons one it helps you to budget to know how much money you should be you're going to be spending under your car rental and it also helps you to know the time because that's it's a significant time investment just to get from place to place and also help set expectations because you know you only have a limited time on your road trip and so making decisions of where to go just the time investment helps you to make better decisions and so this is a really cool bill really cool feature that allows you to make make your trip really become reality and help you to have the best time possible alright with these three tips that we've just talked about you can make an awesome road trip plan it can take a lot of work however even with these tools to put together a successful road trip and to plan out everything as you can see you can spend a lot of time finding the right places and putting it all together if you want to see some samples of some road trips and get a feel for what kind of road trips or if you want to steal from this road trip and just go off of what we've already the work that we've already put through to making it go to car camping tips calm slash road trip thanks for watching and hope that helps

Channel: Decide Outside

Views: 18,358

Keywords: travel, trip planning, google my maps, google my maps trip planning, car camping, road trip, car camping road trip, my maps tutorial

Id: E5Y4hiyq1UM

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 22 2019