I tried importing my route and overlaying it into Google Maps all before 7 am!! Apparently this stuff gets me so excited I can’t sleep at night.

The GPS Visualizer, while great for Google Earth, doesn’t do the Google Map view the way I like it. It has plenty of options (too many?) and all their icons and self-promotion stuff is hidden in their code on their server. I spent some cleaning it up, but now I can’t get the Google Map Types to show properly – street view, satellite, etc. Don’t know what I’m doing, and besides, I don’t want GPS Visualizer so I don’t want to spend too much time fixing it. I just want the points/coordinates from my GPS, not a whole application based on their web server! I’ll be looking elsewhere.. but glad to see it actually works. Here’s what I came up with so far-

Terrain Test

I can probably embed it directly into my blog but I didn’t feel like messing with iframes so there it is, on a separate page. Terrain View is sweet though… I can definitely make use of it on my website… and provide free downloadable .gpx files!! Who does that?? NO ONE. Of course, not too many people have handheld GPS systems yet.. but when they do, I can say I was so far ahead of my time, and a trendsetter : )

Isn’t this such a relief to be reading about hiking instead of brewpubs all the time?? Haha.

Guess what? Today’s Craig’s birthday!! I bought him a Garmin GPSMap 60CSx so we went to test it right away at Chickies Rock.

So cool!! Along with the iPhone in my pocket, I had over $800 worth of gadgetry in my pockets : ) Anyway, we hiked and tracked our route. We didn’t lose the signal once!

You can save your routes as .gpx files from Garmin, or any other GPS system, I’m guessing. And with the GPS Visualizer, you can convert the .gpx file into something Google Earth can read (.kmz file). Then import the kmz into Google Earth. Add -> Network Link, then browse to the file location. Easy, right??

I’m sure the same can be done with Google Maps and their awesome Terrain View. Probably tomorrow, I’ll try it.

Anyway, here are my routes in case you want to import it into your own GPS or Google Earth or whatever.

GPX file
KMZ file