Tools to Create Maps & Itineraries

This entry is part 2 of 11 in the series Travel Tools & Tips for Planning, Scheduling, Recording & Commemorating Your Trips

In this post, I will show you how to create maps using the My Places feature of Google Maps. You can mark all of the places you hope to see from your prioritized list. This you would have created from the steps in my previous post, Tools for Planning Long Trips: Where to Begin. I will show you how to use Google Sheets and Planapple to create your itineraries. You will use the information from Google Maps My Places.

Before I continue, however, these steps involve using Google Maps/Places, Google Sheets, and Planapple in conjunction with TripIt. If you find this is too much to manage, there is an easier way. I’ve described that in the third post in this series: Easier Way to Create Maps & Itineraries. The downside of Scout Explore, however, is that you can’t use its places for navigation.

1. Go to Google Maps using a browser on your larger device. I use Chrome.
2. Click on the menu (the three lines in the top left corner)
3. Choose Your Places
4. Click on the Maps tab
5. At the bottom of this panel, you’ll see Create Map, choose that
6. Name your map
7. You’re not going to import anything. So just go to the search box in the map and enter the first item on your priority list.
8. If you get a direct hit on the item, then you can click Add to Map. If not, you’ll need to hunt down the address or the closest GPS location and add that to the map.
9. Once you’ve added it, you can click on that location marker in your map. Then add an icon to the marker by clicking the style (paint bucket) icon in the modal window. This is useful if you want to denote something in particular. Here I used it to denote that Glen Affric is a lake. I can see that just by looking at My Maps.
   
     

Here’s a picture of my Places Map of our Scotland trip, and you can use this link to view it.

1. Once you have your map, you can start to see where you need to be and for how long. I plan two or three main activities per day plus some backup activities in the event something doesn’t work out, and then I take into account travel time to/from each location to feed into this decision.
2. Next I create a spreadsheet that has the following column headers: Date, Place Name, Location, Region Order, Region, More Info (which contains URLs to more information about the place). Now, because we were doing a lot of waterfall hunting, I also added a “beauty” rating. In Scotland, there are so many waterfalls that you really need to prioritize which ones you want to see by some factor. I chose to rateee them in terms of their beauty. Here’s my Google Sheet for Scotland.
• Make sure to note any activities that might have restrictions on open days/times, so you schedule those on the open days/times. You can put this info in the More info cell of the spreadsheet.
3. By grouping the activities and points of interest into regions, you can use the Places Map along with the spreadsheet to figure out how many days you need in each region, where it makes sense to stay and the travel times to and from those locations.
4. While you are grouping the activities together into days, you can assign arrival days and departure days to the places you plan to stay. Make sure to review the dates/times thoroughly to make sure you don’t have gaps or overlaps of days.
5. You can now proceed to scheduling flights, ferries, hotels, etc.
   • First create an account on the TripIt website and download the free app to your mobile device.
   • When you receive confirmation emails from your bookings, you can forward the emails to pl***@tr****.com . TripIt will automatically create your itinerary from the emails.
   • You can use TripIt for your transportation, lodging and activites/events, but I find it to be too cumbersome and lacking features to be useful for me to use for activities and events. But if you like TripIt’s capabilities, you can skip the rest of this post and just use TripIt.
   • Note: the thing I don’t like about TripIt’s “plans” functionality is that it relies on your email confirmation of a purchase or sign-up for an activity. If you don’t have those, e.g., if you want to go to a National Park or somewhere that you’re not paying for in advance, you don’t have any email confirmation. The only other way to get the activity or event into TripIt is to manually enter it and that’s tedious.
   • My personal preference for itineraries is Planapple. It has both a desktop view and a mobile view.
   • Planapple is a little like Pinterest in that you can search the Internet for something and save it to a trip you’ve defined in Planapple. You can add that thing (e.g., activity, event, location, etc) to an itinerary and if you schedule these items, you’ll be able to see everything in one itinerary with your planned scheduled dates and times. So, if you’ve already captured your URLs for the spreadsheet, here’s where you will be able to add them to Planapple.
     • All you do is add the Planapple save button to your browser, navigate to the URL you already captured, and click on the Planapple save button to add the activity or event to your itinerary.
   • Planapple has an integration with TripIt. Once you’ve added your transportation and lodging confirmations in TripIt, when you add a trip in Planapple for the same date range, Planapple will sync the trip from TripIt. You have to use the same email address for both applications though. So your TripIt items will automatically appear in your Planapple trip. You will have to change the time zones on everything because Planapple saves everything as UTC.
   • Planapple supports the ability to download your trip. Just go to My Trips on the mobile site and click the download icon. If you access the site while in an area without service, you just navigate to it and dismiss the warning (if you get one) that there’s no service. This won’t help you if you have URLs only in the Planapple item. What I do is add helpful directions to the activity in the notes or description of the Planapple item. That way, if you’re out in the middle of nowhere, looking for a waterfall, for example, you can go to the notes/descriptions to see how to get to it without having service.

Series Navigation

<< Tools for Planning Long Trips: Where to BeginAn Easier Way to Create Maps & Itineraries >>