How To Use Google Maps For A Motorcycle Trip or Route

good morning YouTube and welcome to my office this is where all the magic happens we're show the product review videos but the reason that we're in here today is because I'm gonna show you guys how to plan your own Road Trip group ride you name it using Google Maps using the method that I use so let's get into it alright so first things first is I suggest going to a desktop PC now you are able to do this on a mobile phone but is a lot more difficult and for this tutorial I'm going to show you how to do it on a desktop so go ahead and open up a I recommend using Google Chrome open up a incognito tab just because I have my profile signed in and we're gonna be using maps and of course it has my home address everything on that and I don't want you guys know where I live so you can just type in google.com slash Maps or just type in maps and it'll work and that will bring up a map of course it'll probably be close to your location and then I also recommend opening up a another tab and go type in Google sheets this is completely free to use as long as you have a Gmail or Google account you're able to use this so go to Google sheets of course gonna have me log in here alright you can see here kind of some previous ones that I've done so I'm actually gonna go ahead and make a copy of this one this is the Father's Day ride that I did I'm gonna name this one ride tutorial alright so if you've ever worked in Excel before Google sheets is very very very very similar so I'm gonna go ahead and just clear all this out and we'll go ahead and just recreate what we did for the Father's Day ride just as an example so go ahead and make a few columns here I have time event location the Google Maps route notes as well as distance so here's an example of some of the bigger ones I I've done this one has a rival departure and time allotted at the stop this is very very very detailed the only reason that this is so detail is because we are going to be on a time schedule so we need to be at certain places by a certain time so if that's something that you need to do you can go ahead and do this if not something simple like this is going to work all right so go ahead and start with your time so for a group ride I have a meetup time as well as a kickstands uptime so for for this particular route we'll just go ahead and say 9:00 a.m. is going to be our time and the event is going to be meet location so this is going to be your starting location for us this was Kent power sports so you can go back to your Google Maps town type in Camp power sports boom is gonna take you right there the address is located right here Google is nice and simple you can just copy to clipboard and go ahead and paste okay for the Google Maps route we're not going to put anything in this one notes you can put in whatever like for example get gas when you get there distance since this is the starting points that's not going to be available so just type in in a alright so after you meet up of course you're gonna have a time for kick stands up for us that was 10 a.m. KSU is an abbreviation for kick stands up and then location I just for the kick stands up I put towards and then for us it was Rudy's in Austin okay we're not gonna fill in the Google Mouse route just yet and we're not gonna fill in distance just yet so for the Rudi's in Austin I just typed in Rudy's barbecue Austin and the one that we went to was this one right here so once again you can copy your address boom paste that into right there now we can use this to get directions as far as routes and everything from the first spot to the second spot so go ahead and click directions and for your starting point you can go back and copy your address from your start paste that in there and boom goes the dynamite so this has just given us the quickest most direct route and for this particular leg that's okay usually you're not gonna want that don't worry I'm gonna show you how to do that here in a second but for this all we need right here is basically the the miles as well as the shared option here you can also sent to your mobile phone but we'll get to that in a second so route seventy-three point eight miles you don't have to get that exact with it just round it up to 74 the reason I do this is because for group rides need to know if you have sports there's anything with you or smaller tank bikes you need to know how far in between stops that way if they know they need to get gas or if they're gonna be able to make it or not alright then after that you can go ahead and click share and then you can go ahead and copy this link here and then you can paste that right into your document it's gonna keep it as a hyperlink which means that once you share this the person whoever gets it will just have to click that and boom is gonna bring up exactly what you were showing on your original screen over here so back to the feet shows us about an hour 17 minutes so basically you just add that to whatever time you're starting off that and I like to round up so show us getting there approximately 11:30 will be arriving at 1 1 5 7 0 research Boulevard Austin Texas notes gas in front also I like to put in like for example if if we're gonna be having block or anything like that we can say like block left lane when leaving something like that and that way you know what part of the parking lot you're leaving out of what you need to look for that way just minimize the surprises alright so we can just keep on going here I allotted us I think an hour and a half to eat so it was 1:00 p.m. would be kickstands up that was towards Marble Falls is what we ended up going so this is where it's gonna get fun because if we just go from actually let me show you this this button right here is reversing starting and ending points this is really good for routes when you have multiple legs because instead of having to keep copying paste in here you can just do that that now puts Rudy's as your start point and we can make Marble Falls our end point so as you can see this is taking us up 183 takes it down a toll road we don't want to do that we want to go down to this fun road here called Lyme Creek and then up across this way so for the route itself it's really easy to just drag it but I don't like doing that and I'll tell you why is because if I do for example if I go to details and I copy it sometimes let's see if it's gonna do it so that time it worked sometimes I would say most the time it does not do that so what I like to do to just make sure that that doesn't happen is I would like to add a quote unquote stop along this this route to make sure that it hits that now it's it's good to let your group know saying like hey if you have this pulled up this is not an actual stop this is just eight points so I like to just zoom in on the route and just drop something right here and then of course you'll have to move that to the middle that way it's going ABC so it changed our actually changed over out quite a bit so let me go ahead and add one more I'll just make it right there move that up so it's now ABCD wow it really does not want us taking that road does it alright that's alright Matt this happens I didn't do this the first time but you can add up to I want to say like 8 or 9 of these little stops there we go alright so now we have ABCDE let's we got we got the route that we wanted so that brings us down along Lake Travis things like that and eventually ends up in Marble Falls now of course with Marble Falls you don't just want you know just some random address let's go ahead and make our end point this Texico here at Marble Falls that way we have an actual address you can go ahead and copy that address and put it into your next step here so this will be arriving if you look at your time should take you an hour in 26 minutes at 60 miles so 60 miles an hour and a half 2:30 p.m. all right now back to the Maps go to your details and copy or share and then copy link then you can paste that into right there so now we have your route from San Antonio to Austin and we have your route from Austin to Marble Falls if I go ahead and show you if you click on it it has all the stops and it's showing you the route that we actually want alright so next up is finding out where you want your next stop to be of course so I'm gonna go ahead and clear these out and then make Marble Falls my starting point and for this ride we ended up in Buda Texas as the endpoint and of course once again this is giving us the most direct route which we do not want I would like to come down to any one and hit Cypress mill so I'm going to go ahead and add a destination and make that right there a quote unquote stop so now you can see it's giving us the route through Cypress Hill down into Dripping Springs through driftwood in the Buda a very nice Road I am happy with that so let me go ahead and correct my endpoint here since we don't want to go to just Buda let's say let's end it here at the donut palace and go ahead and copy that address once again pasting it here I skipped a step here but tours Udo this will be kickstands up say 30 minutes the gas station 3 p.m. all right now that I have this route I can go ahead and click details share copy link and paste it into your sheet you now have your route from Marble Falls to Buda if you look here showing an hour 17 minutes at 61 miles and go ahead and put 61 miles round it up to an hour and a half 4:30 p.m. we will be arriving there at Buda and for this example that is going to be the complete ride now you can do this a million times you can just have one route just one direction you can have it do a loop you can have it go up and back this is completely up to you I'm just showing this as an example now why why we do it in Google sheets and Google Maps first off it's free second off it works very well and third it's cross-platform so no matter if you are using Android or iPhone you are able to share these across devices so once you've got your sheets looking how you want it and you've got all your stuff in here you can go ahead and click share and you click get shareable link once you click that you can copy it and from there you can go to your Facebook email Twitter whatever you account you use and you can send it to the people that will be on the ride or if you've got their email addresses you can type it in here and it will send an email directly to them automatically you don't do anything so also another huge reason why I like using the Google sheets is if you see right here it says all changes saved in Drive so that means I'm saving it to my Google Drive which if you don't know what that is it's basically a cloud platform so everything that you save you can access it pretty much anywhere so I would just go into Google Drive and it's gonna have pretty much everything that I've been working on here over the past few months or whatever and click here you'll show your most recent one you can click into the right tutorial boom you have it now let me show you what it looks like on your cell phone alright once you have everything done on the computer you can go ahead and download the Google Drive app on your cell phone go ahead and click that open and you can see right here our ride tutorial is the first thing in there go ahead and click that and as you can see it's pretty much exactly what we were just working on now here's the cool part now that you have this on your phone so you're out on a ride and you're ready to go on the next route all you got to do is tap tap and boom you now have the routes that you planned out on the computer and now just so you can see here if I click on this second one this is our second leg you can see that it's saved the exact route that we planned out now you can also see here it says tap to download offline directions for spotty connections on your route this is really beneficial especially if you're going through some rural areas and things like that where you're not gonna have service you can tap it and it says download start it and we'll continue in the background and once that's done basically that will just allow you to open that link up without any sort of cell phone service or anything like that so guys there you have it that is how I plan my group rides road trips you name it that way everyone in the group can be on the same page at all times it's super beneficial because if you have a larger group you know that every single person on there has the addresses has the times they're going to be there that way if anything happens along the way someone gets separating like that they have the ability to get to where you're going safely and on time it's also like an added safety blanket for those people who might not be comfortable riding at the pace that the group is running at they know that no matter what we're going I have the address I have the directions we're good to go now I know we're gonna have the people commenting wolf runs about freedom you're taking the ride and I just ride what I won't ride talk about no computer do not go that's awesome if you can go out and you know not write with anybody else and have the time of your life more power to you this video is not for you I did this video because people have asked how I plan up my rides how I get everyone on the same page and I think that I've kind of developed a maybe not I mean over the years of doing this I've kind of developed in an efficient system to make the rides go a lot smoother and it just works it works on small ride it works on large rides it works on long distance rides it just it works very well so if you have any questions about the process or any technical questions feel free to leave them down in the comment section below I will do my best to answer them but other than that if you like this video go and hit that like button if you haven't already go ahead and punch that subscribe button now as always thanks for watching see you guys 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Channel: Bike N' Bird

Views: 150,137

Rating: 4.8536735 out of 5

Keywords: how to plan motorcycle trip, motorcycle, motorcycle travel, adventure, motorcycle touring, travel, long motorcycle trip, tips, motorcycle trip planning, how to plan a motorcycle trip, motorcycle trip, long distance motorcycle riding, motorcycle touring tips, touring, tour, zook life, harley davidson, road trip, how to, yamaha, motorcycle adventures, trip, planning, tips and tricks, adventure touring, yamaha super tenere, travel tips, motorcycle adventure, preparing, adventure travel

Id: aniJ-j3MU4E

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019