Travel Log

Hi everyone…

After a summer long hiatus I am once again working on organizing and posting photos and stories about my trip. It took me a while to get motivated but now I'm wanting to get things finished so you should start to see regular postings. One of the first things that I did was to map out my trip in Google Earth.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Google Earth you have really been missing out. The Google Earth application provides satellite imagery for the entire planet and lets you zoom in so close in most places that you can see individual people. Well you can see the tops of their heads anyway since they are satellite photos. It also provides overlays showing roads and placemarks that identify buildings, monuments, and all kinds of interesting places. It even has a search feature so you can enter something like "London Tower" or "1600 Pennsylvania Ave" and it will zoom in on that exact place. Pretty cool stuff. The only serious drawback is that streaming the images from the Google server to the application on your computer uses a LOT of bandwidth. You absolutely must have a high speed Internet connection (Cable, DSL, or better) to use this application. You can go to the Google Earth home page at http://earth.google.com for more information or to download the free application.

One of the other neat features of the application is the ability for users to enter their own placemarks. These placemarks can either be posted to the Google Community where everyone can access them or they can be stored in a file that you can share with your friends. I've created a file that contains all of the places I visited during my trip. All you have to do to view this information (assuming that you have Google Earth installed on your computer) is click on the link at the bottom of this message. The information should automatically launch the application and display the information. If it doesn't you can probably download the file (right-click the file name and do a "Save As" to your computer) and then open it with the application.

Once my custom placemark file is loaded and the application is running you should see a folder called "CaptRon-RTW-2006" under the "Places" tab on the left side of the screen. By expanding this file you will have access to all of my placemarks. They are organized into country folders and are roughly in the order that I visited places. Double-clicking on a placemark in the folder will cause the application to zoom to that location. Clicking on the underlined name will pop-up whatever text there is associated with that placemark. I used colored lines to indicate my plane, train, bus, taxi, car, and motorcycle journeys between the placemarks.

I hope you enjoy this little tour. I think it is pretty cool and I hope you like it. I hope to eventually add photos and additional information but I want to get my blog entries finished first. Let me know what you think by giving me a call or sending an email to Criswell@CaptRon.org.

Google Earth Placemark File