Mapping

After telling about some of the blog features in yesterday's entry, I decided to look at some options for mapping that might be interesting to use.

First, I looked at Google Maps Timeline feature. There's been a lot of press about folks not wanting Google to keep track of one's location, and I can understand that, but... for me... the benefits of it automatically keeping up with me outweigh the privacy concerns. Of course, we also do not have a house that we're concerned that someone may break into when we're away, though I guess our trip away from Miss Doozie to Victoria earlier this month might have qualified for risky sharing of location information.

2014 locations - note that it only tracks locations, not routes... our travels started in the DFW area, went east, and then back around through Dallas and out to Arizona.

2015 locations - this was the year that we decided to go fulltime, so lots of time spent around the DFW area getting the house cleared out. It started in Arizona and ultimately ended in New Mexico, on our way back to Arizona.

2016 locations - even though it only has dots, it is pretty obvious at least part of our route! We sure enjoyed our visit to the Maritime/Atlantic Provinces of Canada, particularly Newfoundland! 2016 started in New Mexico and ended in Arizona.

2017 locations - much of the travel was driven by our commitment to be in Casper for the solar eclipse in August, and then our plan to visit as many Thousand Trails campgrounds as we could down the west coast. 2017 started in Arizona, and  ended in Palm Springs, California.

So far in 2018... started in Palm Springs and has so far stayed toward the west.

The "all time" view. I think this only includes our post-retirement travel, as we did not have smartphones that collected our location information prior to retirement. It shows some large empty areas - maybe places that need to be added to our planning lists!

I was wanting to find a way to track our travel for the year with a single view, instead of the multiple maps that I have been posting via google maps (10 locations per map and then copying them down to "Earlier Maps" on the right frame of the blog). I have been playing with My Maps, also a Google tool. It isn't quite as easy to use as google maps, but it is doable, so I think I'm going to replace the item under "Maps" that used to be just the last few locations with a view that will have year-to-date route information. More work to do on this... so hopefully I will have it completed by tomorrow's post!