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 turned inland from the coast after driving through Malibu and went through the canyons. I eventually wound up on Ventura Blvd, then Mulholland Drive.



This next shot shows how the Google Earth community's tags of local areas combines with the GPS data. As I said above, it would be great to have this info while you're driving. I had no idea I was driving by Pamela Anderson's house. It is cool for analyzing the area you were in, but it does lead to a lot of regrets. Oh well, next time I'll research more rather than driving semi-randomly...



After my Hollywood sign adventure (see a previous blog entry), I didn't want to backtrack the way I came, so I blindly drove through a residential area and wound up on the most insanely twisted road I have ever driven down. Hairpin curves, barely one lane, with expensive cars parked right on the road. If you do the "follow track" animation on Google Earth, this one will make you dizzy. Driving it was even worse. I eventually made my way down the mountain back into Hollywood.



The GeoBloggers site is down right now, but another neat trick is that you can upload your photographs to Flickr, then geotag them with the latitude and longitude where they were taken and they will appear as little thumbnails on Google Earth. When you combine this with the tracklogs and the EXIF data from the photographs, you can recreate your entire trip - when you drove where, where and when you stopped to take pictures, and what it looked like when you were there. I'm looking forward to trying this again the next trip I go on.

For example, here is a photo that I took while driving the canyons illustrated above. When the Flickr geoblogging link is working, I can see the exact spot where the photo was taken. You can do this by comparing the EXIF data to see when the photo was taken and compare it to the tracklog data, or you can cheat like I did and find the little spot on the track where I stopped at a pull-off to take the picture.



Oh yeah, with all of this neat technology, I was 0 for 3 for the geocaches I looked for my last day...