Playing with maps

I enjoy plotting our travels on a Google map -- if you're on the website for this blog, you can see our current year's travel map on the upper right side. Here's an image of it:

I told Carl that we need to make a couple of trips into the Gulf of Mexico so the outline of a Canadian goose (or any kind of goose) would be more complete! (I don't think that's gonna happen!)

If you click on the map on the website (or use this link), you can interact with the map, seeing what each location is, etc. 

This summer, I was comparing how far north we traveled when we went to Newfoundland last year versus our trip to Alaska this summer. In the process, I created a travel map that includes all of our stops since Carl and I were married in 2020, grouped (or "styled" in Google's terminology) by year:

Google maps chose the different colors for the different years. Note that I did not put the linkages from one stop to the next as that would have added a significant amount of additional work. Anyway, you can see from this view that our trip to Newfoundland did not get us anywhere near as far north as our trip this summer did.

This map is more interesting if you go to the map view itself -- follow this link (clicking on the link will open a new window if I did it correctly). When you're on the site, if you hover over any of the years (in the legend on the left side), it will bring the locations for that year to the front.

This is probably more interesting to us than to anyone else, but... in case you're interested in doing something similar, I accomplished it with an Excel spreadsheet with all of our stops listed for each year. If you want more details, I am happy to help you with your own -- the difficult thing is getting all the data together for each year.