Chris Palmer's Avoidance Central: Trips, Google Earth, and a GPS: "Trips, Google Earth, and a GPS
A few months ago I went to southern California on a business trip, but I stayed over a day or two to sightsee. I was staying in Santa Ana, near the HUD office where I had meetings, but I wanted to see as much of the coast as possible and see Los Angeles, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and all of those other places I'd never been.

I brought my GPS along so that (a) I wouldn't get lost (I hoped), (b) I might do some geocaching, and (c) to experiment with storing my track logs to see remember everywhere I went. I didn't always have good reception and I didn't always remember to turn it on, but I managed to get a pretty good record of everywhere that I drove, which was about 500 miles in the four or five days I was there.

Once I got back, I uploaded the GPS tracks into Google Earth so I could visualize them. One of the coolest tricks that Google Earth does is to let you 'fly' along the tracks at any speed and altitude that you wish, so I can virtually recreate each drive over 3D scenery overlayed with satellite photos. This would have been great to do real time while I was there, because I was extremely frustrated to find that I had missed wonderful things that I drove right by or were just a few blocks away from.

This first shot shows an overview with all the tracks for the week. You can click on it to see a larger version:



The intense area in the middle around Santa Ana and Anaheim is where my hotel was. In this closeup, you can even see every parking space that I parked in. The lines off the parking lot was where I was looking for a geocache.



Where this really shines is when you combine it with Google Earth's 3D views. Here is a shot where I tu"