If you’re like me, you’ve just found out about this feature on Google not too long ago, in which case CONGRATULATIONS!
You’re life is about the get that much easier. For everyone else, bear with me, I will explain.
For me it was in August of 2018 when going on a week long trip to Iceland for my birthday. I could’ve only imagined an app or a website to visually map out all of my desired locations that I have yearned to see for quite a while now. I knew that normal Google maps allows us to save locations into one of three general categories (Want to Go, Favorites, and Starred Places) but what I didn’t know was that Google My Maps let’s you do cooler, more elaborate planning and organizing of your trip, and who wouldn’t want that? Let’s get started.
If you have a trip coming up and want to visually map out places you will visit and all the sightseeing you might want to do or just map out the routes from place to place, we’ll you’ve found your solution. Photos will be attached for better understanding.
The basics:
When we go to Google DRIVE (not maps) and click on +NEW then click “More” down below and select a new Google My Maps.
A new window will pop open with a brand new map for your endeavors, like this.
All you have to do, is type in the search bar all the places you think you might like to visit, or want to visit 100% and a drop pin will be placed there so you could re-visit them later.
Here is an example of what mine from Iceland looked like.
We are able to change the icons of the pins so I changed them to actual photos of the places so when I went back to look at this in the future, I’d be able to decipher the name of the place from Icelandic to a memory of a photo taken there (since the language is a bit complicated!)
When I zoom into my map, you can see there is a blue line forming a “route” from the Airport to our first stop in Iceland, the famous Blue Lagoon, because they are close to each other and apparently most tourists go there either on their way to and from the airport with them being so close in proximity.
We hit all the famous spots on the west side of Iceland and we will have to go back to see the east part eventually. The cool feature of My Maps is being able to add layers to your map for different routes to get to paces, and different days of itineraries. I’m not too much of an expert on Maps yet for I have just discovered this awesome feature but I’ll gladly be using it for all my trips from now on. Play around with it and see what you can do too!
Next stop, Greece this summer of 2019 for my birthday, wooohoo!
Hopefully this helps some of you travelers out there who also didn’t know this feature existed until now!