How to Plan a Road Trip with Google Maps

A road trip might be difficult to plan, but with the correct tools and resources, it can be a breeze. You may obtain a bird’s-eye perspective of your itinerary, trip mileage, and driving hours by putting travel locations into Google Maps, and you can load your personalized map onto your smartphone for turn-by-turn navigation. Here’s how to plan a road trip with Google Maps.

How to Make Your Own Route on Google Maps

To plan a road trip correctly, you’ll need to construct a custom map, which entails accessing Google Maps from a desktop computer. Once you’ve finished, you can view your personalised map on the Android or iOS applications.

To begin, go to the upper left corner of the screen and select Menu, then Your Places. Then, on the far right tab, pick Maps, and then Create Map at the bottom of the list. This will take you to a new page where you can make your own map.

The first thing you should do is name your map. To open the Edit map title and description menu, click where it reads Untitled map in the upper-left box. After giving your map a name and a description, click Save.

After that, choose a theme for your base map. Various themes can be useful for a variety of objectives. For hiking trails, for example, a landscape layout may be useful, although planning driving routes with a basic Map or a Simple Atlas theme may be more precise.

The next thing to learn how to plan a road trip with Google Maps is to choose your chosen theme by clicking the downward-pointing arrow beside Base Map.

Your personalised map can also be made up of numerous levels, each with its own set of details and destinations. More layers can be added by selecting Add layer in the top greyed-out bar, and layers can be removed or renamed by clicking the three dots beside their names.

♦ Are You Bored of Busy Routine? How to get Fever?

How to Pin Locations on the Map

Pins are used to identify specific locations and provide unique descriptions. To add a pin, either search for a location you want to visit or click Add marker underneath the search bar to pinpoint a location on the map.

You can alter the title, description, and style of your pin after it’s been placed on the map to highlight crucial details. By clicking Edit, I’ve highlighted a ferry ramp with a departure time to Vancouver Island in this example. By tapping the paint-bucket icon, I’ve also changed the icon to indicate a car ferry.

How to Draw a Route with Multiple Stops

On your personalised maps, you can design a variety of routes, including driving, walking, and bicycle routes. For this demonstration, I’ll draw a driving course and show how to add more stops to it.

To get started the Google Maps trip planner multiple stops, go to the search box and click the Draw a line icon, then Driving route.

Then, on the map, choose your starting place. In this example, I’ve chosen the Ferry Ramp Arrival pin as my starting location. Then pertaining to learning how to plan a road trip with Google Maps, decide where you want to go. I’ve chosen the small town of Chemainus as an example. Google will construct a new layer with the quickest route between the two points by default.

Click Step-by-step directions from the menu on your new layer to see the distance and time it will take to drive.

Let’s pretend I want to eat lunch along the road. By clicking Add destination, you can add a stop to your driving route to plan just that. I’ve zoomed in on the map in this example to discover a highly-rated restaurant that I’d want to visit.

Then put in or click the name of the stop you want to add on the map. Then, to prioritise where you want to go first, click or drag the stop. Because it will be in the middle of my visits, I’ve shifted my lunch stop from C to B in this occasion.

Your custom map will be updated to include the new stop, and the step-by-step will be updated as well. You can make as many stops as you want along your route.

How to Share Your Road Trip

You can share your customised map with others so that you can all plan your road trip together. This is a terrific method to get your trip partners on the same page or to keep track of your journey for people you’ll be visiting.

To share a map, go to the Google My Maps website, sign in, and go to the Owned tab. This is where you should list your custom map.

On your personalised map, click the Share Map icon. This will allow you to share your customised map by Facebook, Twitter, email, or embedding it on your website.

You can also share your map directly with people by creating a custom link.

To access the map editor, go to the Owned page of the Google My Maps website and click on your own map. Then, on the left-hand menu, select the Share option.

This will open the Share options. Enable the top slider from here to allow anyone with the link to view your custom map.

All that’s left in learning how to plan a road trip with Google Maps is to do now is copy your custom link and share it with others via your preferred messenger.