Well, I think I've found the holy grail. Almost, at least. For years now I've tried a million different ways to create an electronic map for club rides, along with a loadable GPS file. Up until now, that usually meant doing duplicate work, and if you do a careful job at it, it will take hours to create both files. The typical process is to create a Microsoft Streets and Trips map for printing, then duplicate the effort in Garmin's Mapsource for the GPS. That could be shortened slightly by converting the waypoints on the S&T map, but it still took some time and tweaking on the Mapsource side.
Google, bless their hearts, have continued to upgrade their online mapping tools. And in its latest iteration, it has a better and easier interface than any of the standalone pc-based map tools. Which is amazing to me in a web app. Anyway, all you need to do is go to
http://maps.google.com, enter in a starting and ending destination, and hit go. You'll have the blue line for your route. Then the neat part is you just drag parts of that blue line onto the roads that you want to use, zooming in and out as necessary, and it will immediately calculate the route using that waypoint and modify the blue line accordingly. It takes just a few minutes to finalize a great route from beginning to end. But the next trick is getting that information from the web app to something you can load on a GPS.
Enter
GMaptoGPX. Go to that webpage and follow the instructions to add their bookmark to your toolbar. Though it should work on IE and Firefox, it tends to work better for me on Firefox. Once it is installed, you just go to your handy-dandy google map, and you hit the GMaptoGPX button in your toolbar, and it pops up some text. If you hit "Full", it populates the text with an extremely complete list of waypoints representing your route. All you need to do is copy that text, and save it as a .gpx file somewhere on your PC. And now you have a .gpx file of that route. In seconds. The hitch is that there may be thousands of waypoints, and some GPS's can only handle 500 waypoints per track or even only 50 waypoints per route. So just load the .gpx file into MapSource, and double-click on the track, hit filter, and you can filter down to 50 to 100 waypoints or so. To make the track into a route, you can use WinGDB (
can be downloaded from here). Then once it is a route, you can re-open it in Mapsource and hit recalc, and the route will follow the roads exactly once again, and is simple enough to load right to a GPS.
In paragraph form this may seem clunky, but I assure you it has changed a 2 - 4 hr process into a < 10 minute process. Here it is in step-by-step form:
- Open firefox browser, go to maps.google.com. (If you don't have the GmapToGPX bookmark installed, do that first)
- Click "get directions" link. Enter starting and ending point, hit "get directions" button.
- Pull the route onto the roads that you want to go on, just like taffy. If you add a waypoint that you no longer want, just right-click on it and hit remove. Repeat until the route is right on the roads that you want.
- Right-click on "Link to this page" on the upper right to copy the link, and then paste/save said link somewhere else (text file, clip-board, email, anywhere). That link will let you come back to the full map any time later without redoing anything.
- Print the route right from Google; it has good printing options and is all one needs to navigate from a paper map.
- Hit the GMaptoGPX button. Once the textbox comes up, press "FULL".
- Copy all of the text in the textbox and paste it into a blank text document (Wordpad works great for this), and save it. Change the file suffix on the text document to .gpx.
- Open the .gpx file in Garmin Mapsource, confirm that the track is identical to your chosen route (but has thousands of points).
- Filter the track (double-click on the track name and choose "Filter"), and select a set number of points (100 seems to be a good option).
- Save the file as a GDB v2 file (not the default v3, since WinGDB can only deal with v2 files).
- Run WinGDB to convert the track to a route.
- Open the converted file in Mapsource again, and right-click on the route and select "recalculate". The calculated mileage should be very close to the google numbers.
- Sync your GPS with Mapsource, and make sure the route is on your GPS.
You're done. Spend the hours you saved in front of the tube with a beer in your hand. Either that or on motorcycle maintenance.
If anyone tries this and finds some shortcuts or corrections, just let me know so I can update this post.
- Alex