reddogg blogg

If you just look at one thing, you should click here to view the Google Maps mashup. I recommend viewing roughly from right to left, you can mouse over the various icons to read my ramblings and see my National Geographic quality photography.

Cali07
Lee was recently accepted to Art Center college in Pasadena, California. It was agreed that I would accompany Lee on a road trip out to Los Angeles. I had already made the trip from Austin to San Francisco without stopping across I-10 and up I-5 and had already decided I wanted a more enjoyable trip this time. Lee casually he mentioned he wanted to see the Grand Canyon and I took it from there using Google Maps I consulted several friends about the best route. What we ended up with was an amalgam of these suggestions, more direct lines for the sake of time and a few mistakes. It was a pretty overwhelming couple of days. In just a short time we traveled 2000 miles which was roughly 31 hours of raw driving time. We hiked a bit in the Grand Canyon, trudged around Joshua Tree and waded in the Pacific Ocean all within 2 days time. In the end temporary housing was established for Lee in Pasadena and the fall semester was set in motion at Art Center.

Map Mashup
We depended a lot on Google Maps throughout our trip and by the end I had a rough vision of how I wanted to present our travels. Out of 250 photographs I chose 40 that were the best and/or fitting and posted them to Picasa Web Album using an iPhoto to Picasa uploader. Unfortunately I can’t present both our Google Maps path taken and the Google Maps mashup at the same time; or at rather, you can’t.

Google Earth
Here is the mashup in KML format which you can open using Google Earth. You can simply take a Google Maps directions set link and append “&output=kml” to the end of the URL to make it savable KML. Google Earth Blog has several good articles on KML and exporting Google Maps. I found some other information on how to hosting your own KML or converting GM to GE, but hopefully just the link hack will work. There is so many cool things being done with mashups that leverage APIs and feeds like GeoRSS. Before my next global travels I need to figure out geocoded photos.