2 Boo Hiss Google Maps

A Big Boo Hiss To Google Maps! 
I have been trying to create a "wish tour" on Google Maps for days. While I finally figured out how to add the points of interest I want, and delete those mistakenly added points, I cannot for the life of me wrangle the "draw a line" feature in to submission.

The idea is great. As soon as I watched the intro video for creating tours, I decided to create a tour of my dog's travels across country.




The video made it look easy enough. But then the trouble started. It took me forever to figure out how to fix and delete points. In hindsight it seems easy enough: simply type in a location you want to find; click on it; choose "save to" and select the map you want to save it to. Simple.

But I was trying to manually enter points at first. I also ran into trouble with some points being inaccurate, as in my Well Traveled Dog Map. I wanted to tear out my hair trying to figure out how to place the points in some sort of chronological order, hence the word "tour."

Below is the first map I attempted. I found it exceedingly difficult to place lines along roads. It took several hours to get the this exceedingly inaccurate map to look as it does.





View The Well Travelled Dog in a larger map


I decided that perhaps the problem lay in the cross-country distances with the dog map. So I set out to create a tour of my favorite consignment shops in western North Carolina. Google's how-to video used a walking tour in San Francisco as an example. I figured if I stayed in a smaller area, I would have better luck. Nope, it was worse. Part of the problem is that mine is a driving tour. The walking tour example used straight lines on relatively straight street blocks, and a relatively short distance.

Mine is a driving tour, and the feature that sets a line along roads would be ideal if it worked. The platform seems buggy.  The directions say, "click to start drawing a line along the roads." But that only works some of the time. If there is a point of interest in the way, the tool will toggle from "draw" to "grab."

The few times that I got the line to start, I couldn't get it to stop, even though I followed the "double click to set and end point" instructions.




View Consignment Shop Tour in a larger map

I have poured hours into these two inaccurate and incomplete maps and have drawn the following lessons from them. 1) They are not easy enough for me to enjoy using them for individual projects 2) I was initially excited about the prospect of chambers of commerce or historical societies being able to create tours in and easy-to-use WYSIWYG environment. Wrong! If I were a business with my heart set on creating a tour, I would be in and even bigger rage than I am right now.