How to plan road trip w/ Google My Maps

if you're anything like me you might find yourself planning for your next adventure in the midst of a global quarantine as your luggage collects dust in the corner we're clearly the glass half full type of people with the idea of a road trip on my mind i've been having fun mapping out what my vacation might look like and i thought i'd share with you guys a tool that i've found to be really helpful so when i first went to plot out my road trip i went to google maps but where i actually wanted to be was google my maps so i'm going to show you what that interface looks like i'm going to launch google chrome here and the very first thing you want to do is make sure you're signed into your gmail account so wherever you log into google from here on out whether it's a different computer or an app you'll be able to access the maps that you created within google so i'm logged in just in the google search bar i'm going to type my maps this is how i get to it top link there and here we go here's our blank slate so whatever maps you create no matter how many they'll all show and display here right now we're just gonna do one map now i find this really fun to do online because i grew up camping with my family we had a motor home we went cross country a couple times and i remember my parents having that big road atlas that was usually wedged in the passenger side door but i do remember my parents pulling that out and and plotting where we wanted to go as we were on the road um which you know if i went on a road trip now i'd still probably bring that thing but it is fun to organize it online and have a digital copy as well so let's get started this is a really easy interface to navigate i'm going to go ahead and label this and let's do an american southwest road trip there we go and i'm going to create a couple layers and i think i'll start with destinations let's lay out a couple of destinations so the cool thing about using the google interface is you don't necessarily need to know the addresses for anything you can just do a quick search and it will automate some suggestions of what you might be looking for so i'm going to go for sedona arizona now this drops a pin here but you actually have to add it to your map it's not there yet so i'm going to hit that feature and you can see that sedona has dropped into my destinations layer i'm gonna add two more spots grand canyon and let's do zion have you guys been to these places they are incredible and i cannot wait to go back there we go and you know what while i'm in destinations i'm gonna add the airports that i'm flying into the idea for this road trip is i'm flying into phoenix and i will be flying out of mccarran in vegas and obviously renting a car between those destinations so let's zoom all the way out we can see what our map looks like so far there we go just by looking at this view i can see that i will be flying in here working my way up north and looping back down to the vegas area the map is cool it looks a little cluttered to me so you can actually change the view of the map itself whatever you think is easiest to read i actually find this dark one to just be the simplest looking one and um the most organized for me anyway all right so we've got our destinations let's make another layer for accommodations and by the way i'm ignoring this yellow tab that you may have seen pop up earlier you can import your data from elsewhere i think from spreadsheets i haven't actually used that feature so i'm not going to pretend to know anything about it but i am a spreadsheet person so i'm sure i'll find this useful in the future i'm just not going to pretend to know anything about it at this point plus i want to show you what this program looks like just operating in it manually so let's name this layer accommodations just to pause for a second i want to say that i don't use this program to research it necessarily i've kind of done my research separate from this and i'm coming here after the fact when i know the things that i want to see what i want to do where i want to be and laying it all out on this map you can search in this within this interface because it is google but i don't know that's just not my workflow and i'll show you how i do that in a little bit just in case that's how you guys want to operate but let's start out i know the hotels i want to stay at i'm going to start typing them out here hilton in sedona perfect add to map el tovar hotel add to map and zion canyon lodge great and you can see as i was doing that they dropped into the accommodations area occasionally they will go into the wrong layer i think that's because all of these layers are turned on at the moment so it might accidentally drop into the wrong layer i just want to show you can drag and drop these wherever you need it to be if it ends up in the wrong spot let's zoom all the way up great now by looking at this view i can't really distinguish what is a hotel and what is the overall destination at this point so you can customize what your icons look like i'm gonna turn these hotels into little yellow symbols it's a pretty neat feature also you can turn layers on and off so if you knew you just want to see where you're st like what hotels or campgrounds you're staying in you could turn off destinations and just look at your accommodations on the map all right and i'm going to add one more layer just to give you guys an idea of different things you can do and this will be where there's a motorcycle going by i don't know if you guys can hear that uh activities and let's do i'm gonna do two examples here i know that i loved hiking devil's bridge trail in sedona so i'm going to find that add to map and there is a trail that i loved in the grand canyon and i'm going to use this opportunity to show you the search feature if i hit grand canyon i'm kind of in that area there we go so if i was looking for a trail i wanted to do in the grand canyon i can have this view open here and i can type hiking and it will search places near this current view and it's not going to give you everything it's going to give you i guess the most popular or just the ones that are however google prioritizes things but let's check out and see what they've got south rim so i was actually looking for a trail that did not pop up on this map i do know the name bright angel trail add to that yeah i don't know why it didn't pop up in the search and that is why i don't use this search function within google here i tend to do my research offline or at least off of this website and i see that it accidentally dropped into destination so i'm going to drag that down to activities and similar to what we did with accommodations i'm just going to [Music] kind of color code this so it's easier for me to see and two different greens and that's all right okay great so this is our map now we're all here because we want to figure out the road trip itself how long is the drive between each destination and um with that how long you might want to spend in each destination specifically so how do we do that we're going to go up here you know what let me turn off i'm just going to map this road trip with the destinations only not necessarily the hotels so if i come up here to this arrow add directions and i'm going to select where i want to start my trip phoenix sky harbor jump down to b so that's sedona add destination let's move up to north rim add destination zoom out a little bit okay interface being a little clunky right now okay did that click yes there it is all right so that is our road trip and let me change the base map view i just want to show you a cool thing if you knew for example that this road had some really cool site that you wanted to see you can hover over this road and drag it to where you want it to go so i believe this kind of organizes it by fastest route i think but you can move the road wherever you you would like to drive now that we have our road laid out we want to know the timing between each destination so i'm going to go over here in the directions layer and hit step by step directions and there we go this trip is a total of 793 miles 14 hours and it breaks it down into directions between each destination on the map how long that drive time is going to be and that just gives me the best idea of what my road trip's going to look like and that is how easy this interface is to use now before i sign off i want to show you two two more cool features that may be able to help you guys let's turn accommodations back on and activities for example i'm going to change my base map back to the view that i prefer so in sedona let's say i know i want to wake up on wednesday morning and head out to the trail i don't necessarily want to add this road to my road map it's just something i'm doing during the day it's not part of my overall drive i could take this tape measure right here hit the destination and start i hit the location that i'm starting at and drag it to the destination i'm ending at and that's easily displaying nine and a half miles so it gives me a rough estimate of how far apart these places are it's good on the fly too like if you're somewhere and you want to know where is this restaurant how long is it going to take me to get there you can easily lay that out on the map you just hit escape on your keyboard to exit that feature similarly the other thing i want to show you is you can add a marker so let's say you knew grandma lived in cornville and you wanted to visit her you don't know your exact address but you want to put it on your map as a reminder that hey grandma's in town you may want to stop there you may not whatever it is so you're going to hit that and you can customize that right there not sure why that's not typing there we go grandma's house when you hit save you can see it generates that exact longitude and latitude again this may not necessarily be grandma's house but it's just a way to put a marker on the map for something you may be considering doing and if you decide hey don't feel like visiting grandma this time you can hit delete feature and it takes it right off your map and once you have this map generated let's take a step back here here it is it's within your google my maps and you can access it anywhere where whether it's on a desktop or out on the road through an app so it is easily accessible easily changeable and a great tool for your future road trip [Music] you

Channel: akfasso

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Keywords: how to use google maps, how to use google my maps, how to plan a road trip, planning a road trip, roadtrip, american roadtrip, southwest, sedona, grand canyon, zion, national park, how to create customized map, how to make road map, how to make trip map, using google maps, tutorial, road atlas, southwest road trip, rv road trip, camper, camping, trailer, travel, what is google my maps, best way to plan road trip, best american road trip, epic road trip, best road trips

Id: 2c2DGSDxtGU

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020