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Comment by anticristi | Hacker News Reader

I'm about to organise a family road trip and I can see how this tool can make that so much more informative and fun. I currently rely on an Google Sheet and Google Maps List, which is a bit tiring.

I'd like to see the following features:

- Ability to search for GPS coordinates.

- Ability to search for plus codes (I hate them, but Google forces them onto me.)

- Display route duration: This is good for judging if a segment is too long and needs to be spliced in two.

- Somehow searching for places in Europe is lacking compared to Google Maps.

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I started planning out a someday road trip. I found mymaps.google.com at least a good starting point as I want to (in the US) do something that is vaguely circular--i.e. avoids excessive backtracks and spurs. It let me choose a bunch of locations and assign various colors as I tuned the route.

Seems to do the trick. Thanks for the tip!

I'm sure I'll end up using other planning and tracking tools, including paper state maps and a laminated US map I bought. But I found this really helpful as a first cut at "What's an interesting big swing I can do that optimizes for places I haven't been but want to see and that involves a minimum of out-of-the-way driving." I basically put a bunch of color-coded places on the map and then started recoloring them if they didn't really fit my objectives.

My intent is certainly not to overplan. But having a "strategic" first cut seems useful.

My 2013 honeymoon was a four-week, 7000-mile loop from Seattle down the Pacific coast and back up through the Rockies. We were in a Honda Fit and camped about 60% of the nights, usually at a NFS or NPS campground when possible. We passed through the majority of the National Parks in the western states, including the Grand Canyon and Glacier.

I planned the entire route in Google Maps (“My maps”) and then used a highlighter to trace it out on a paper road atlas because I didn’t own a smartphone at the time. We used interstate highways sparingly. The only time we almost lost our way was while trying to find a primitive campground high above Death Valley on some unpaved NFS roads.

Have you ever tried out google earth pro? It's pretty powerful and could cover all these.

glad to hear it!

searching for lat/lng, route duration, and better search are in the works

what's the deal with plus codes? i've heard about them a couple times but don't have a good sense of where/how they are used

Plus codes are pretty much like GPS coordinates, but made by Google: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/

For some reason Google Maps throws plus codes at you, but requires you to dig deeper to find GPS coordinates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code

> i've heard about them a couple times

Did you do much competitive analysis?

> don't have a good sense of where/how they are used

This is arguably a main problem with geocodes, however they are well designed or not (I believe plus codes are actually pretty well designed). It is obvious that they can't replace street addresses---unless they don't already exist, in which (uncommon) cases geocodes can actually be a solution---so they have to solve some different problems than street addresses, but those problems are too niche. If they look like solutions looking for problems, that's because they mostly are.

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