How to use Google My Maps to plan a trip

hey everyone this is Naomi from roaming the Americas today I just wanted to show you one of my favorite tools for helping me to plan my trip and that is of course from Google it is called Google my maps it's a little bit different than just regular Google Maps because it lets you create custom maps where you can add pins onto the map anywhere that you want so you can really plan out your trip visually and I am at personal and very visual and I really love to be able to see all the things that I'm planning laid out on a map so I'm gonna show you how to create one today and first I had to Google my maps on your desktop just type in Google my maps into Google or head to google.com slash my naps pretty simple it's gonna take you to this brand new place if you haven't made any map you have a lot of Google accounts you just want to make sure that you're using the account that you want to use to create your mouth I'm going to switch up chunks right um pretty self-explanatory just head in to create a new map and you will come to this untitled thing nothing on it yet you can change your map title and for this a recent trip that I did and I actually did create a map for it but I'm going to show you from scratch how to do it you can add a description if you want to you don't have to then you can change your major title as well so let's do sign so you can use layers in any way that you would like if you want to do like dining lodging and things to do you can do that or if you like to do day-to-day itineraries you can do a layer for each day or you could just use the layers at all just do one thing later so what I do is I've I'm researching let's see as I was researching I found this area called view Street and that's where I wanted to meet up with my friend to explore a little bit before we head it down to the National Mall so I found the visitor center so that's a place that I want to put off to my mouth so here's the address right now pop that in and we have Washington DC popping up so that's what I want goes up okay so when you add in an address or a location you're then you take into that spot on the map just add to map and then what you can do is edit your pin so we've got a pin right here that that pin is on the map and then we can edit it so I want to put visitors center and then you can also add in notes here and I like to sometimes add in a website if it's not already listed and that's what the powers in there so you can put all kinds of notes in here to remind yourself of things if you like and then we say that we see visitor center there and then we can also change sorry the style and you can change the icon as well as the color so let's make this this darker blue and we've got popular icons here I went a little informational sign so it's exactly what I want all right so now we've got that pin for the informational Center now it's not dining I'm gonna have to change that layer but add a layer II know and then you can just drag drag things from the layers layer or within the later okay now another place that I wanted to go was Busboys and poets that's where we went for lunch three in that neighborhood so you can either type in the address which we have it here or just start typing a location so they've got summer locations so there this is the one I want to choose and it takes you to that spot on the Google map so if it has a Google listing you see it should come up in the search and then you'll see its address the web site the phone number even the reviews so that's super helpful if there's no Google listing and you want to go with the address at any function right so we added the two right things to do move that up to dining and then again I could add notes in here if I wanted to and the style let's change our dining to this yellow color and we've got a little more tonight icon for dining another spot that looked cool for dining with it place called County farmers countertops right here okay so you see I added the address and it takes you to the address specifically and it had that of the title now if I just click on found new farmers and I can add that to them now if I would have added the address of the amount owed it just had to change title and and all that and it wouldn't actually be that spot it would have been that pin so sometimes it kind of doesn't match up exactly but you can play with it and do as much hey let's choose your colors so you can just keep adding pins and you'll be able to zoom in and out now you can see several different things happening you can add more layers if you click on something it's going to show you your notes and all that good stuff another thing that you can do is add a layer with directions now I don't find this particularly useful for actual directions because I'll tell you why in just a moment as far as how this map works on your phone but what I do find it useful for is showing a route on a map so let's say you're gonna do a walking tour which we actually did the other day when I was in Washington DC or a bike path I'll show you one of those from my trip to grow into the Mont and you want to show sort of the whole route on the map I find that the directions layer works really well so the way that we can do that is go to a place and this is where we started I'm going to add to map and then do directions so if you click on that little arrow you'll be able to do the directions so I actually just added a pin and then now I've got a direction layer now the other way to do that let's just delete those I'm going to show you the other way too so this is how you delete okay the other way to do it is to click this right here okay so now we've just got a blank layer with directions I want to do walking directions because we did a walking tour so we started at Ben's Chile and then we went to U Street Northwest and 14th I think okay so now we're seeing sort of this line this uh route now this brought the second point over here I kind of don't want it right there so I can just drag it right there so now we can add more and see how you know as I drag this on here it's taking different places so I can either type in here an address or location or I can use this cursor and I and double click and that's what I'm going to do there we go and added see and then add a destination I'm not sure I've got all these destinations exactly right as to where we actually went but this is just to show you okay and I'm D so I don't actually use this like I said or actual direction it's just like if I'm planning something where we're gonna be walking around or doing a bike path and I want to see where that is on the map I find that this is helpful layer to use okay so I mentioned that you can also use this on your phone I like to create the maps on my desktop I find that the easiest way to do it and it's you can have all the tabs open for all of you know places that you're researching and and all that and it's really easy but to use it on the go you can access it on your phone so if you have an Android you can do it one of two ways you can go into Google map and go to play I believe and you scroll over and look from that and the other way that you can do it is to download a separate app Google - so if you just if you don't really want to go into your map and have all that open and you just want to use Google my maps you can access it that way on Android there's a separate app for Google my map now you can open it up in Google my maps click on something and then hop over and get directions to it like straight it'll take you right through all my maps into Google Maps or you know you can just use Google Maps and see where you are on the map currently you can be looking at all your pins on that Google map and and navigate while you're on the go and then iPhone it's also right within the Google map app there's not a separate app for the whole Google my maps so you also have to access it from Google Maps if you've had it over and here watching this just on YouTube you can head over to the post on roaming the Americas the link will be in the comments or in the description below and I have a link to where you can find exactly how to use the apps and use this map on the go whether you're using iPhone or Android so I just want to show you a couple examples of real maps that I made and used and the different ways that you can organize it so I mentioned I think I mentioned Burlington Vermont I went there last summer and so this was a map that I created I was going to be there for about a week so I had a lot of things on the map as you can see so I've dining here and I have a little coffee cup for the cafe's have lodging and things to do so I have a little hiking icon on picnic tables with other parts and so you see all the different kind of icons and then the directions one that is the bike path so that's really where I wanted to be able to see and highlight that bike path and so I did that directions they are product so you can zoom in click on anything see any note that might be in there it's real great now another way that I like to use it is when I'm just sort of planning a maybe trip this is where I store great places that I'm finding along the way I know that I want to travel back to Costa Rica I know that I wanted to get trip to Colombia so I've started mass for those places because I started to to see things popping up in I think oh yeah I really want to go there and I don't want to forget about that place so I just create a Google my nap and it's a place where I can store information and ideas and one thing that you can do I know this spot right here that was from a blog post that I have read and so I put a little bit of information there and the blog post link in that can so that's a great way to do it as well now another cool thing that you can do is well when you when you are creating these maps they will go into the Google Drive folder for that account that you're using you can then move it into a subfolder if you want but this was a really in-depth trip that I was planning and so I have you know some Google Docs where I just dump a bunch of ideas and all that and then when you double-click on it from your Google Doc it'll just take it right into the Maya directly so as you can see for this trip that I took I had some color coding going on I I did the camera icon for any places that I was finding that people set up this is a really good spot for photos it's kind of just like a visual reminder it's a great way to see where everything is and just organize your trip and you can it's so flexible you can organize it in so many different leaves or you can just dump everything in there and and to store it in one place so I that you found that helpful like I said if you've had it over to roaming the Americans to the link that's in the description look if you're already on the page and you can read in detail all my tips and different ways to use this but hope you found this helpful and let me know if you have any questions

Channel: Roaming the Americas

Views: 102,574

Keywords: travel, travel planning, trip planning, Google Maps, road trip, trip itinerary, custom map

Id: JXe1CC6-swI

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2017