We have used Google Earth for the following for our holidays in Spain and Portugal.
1 Booking a property for a holiday, you can see what the area is like before you book.
2 We have found many good bird watching areas by looking on GE, for instance, look for a road crossing a river, is there anywhere to park nearby, has the river edges got reeds or trees where birds may be. Having identified a place, note down the coordinates of latitude and longitude, and enter them into a Tom Tom car gps, and use it to take you to that place.
3 We have also been able to plan walks from looking at an area on GE. On the high resolution pictures we can see track/paths, and again take lat and long coordinates at every change in direction, and enter them into a hand held gps. Run the gps when you are on holiday and it takes you on the walk.
4 Great for looking at the roads to get out of a big airport, we have flown into Madrid several times, the first could have been a bit hair raising, as a new terminal had been built, talk about spaghetti junction, glad we had looked on GE and also used the Tom Tom.
5 While on a walk, you can press a button as you walk, on the hand held gps, which logs lat and long. When you get home you can feed those lat long positions into GE and they will show up on the GE image, great to see where you walked.
6 We mark on GE where we have seen particular birds, and the date. These points are saved as a .KMZ file, and can be shared with other birders who have GE, it also reminds us where we have seen the birds from one year to next.
7 I sometimes use GE for my work. The other day I had to go to a mobile home park. I was able find where the car park on the site was, amongst the tangle of roads in the park. I have also been able to find the nearest car park to a job in towns.
The combination of both GE and GPS is invaluable.
An example of the out of the way places we seek for a holiday. The property is in the centre of the picture, the owners above. This one in Extremadura Spain.
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=39.207467,-6.172176&spn=0.002847,0.003905&t=h&z=18The area and the roof amongst the trees
The Property
Hope that was not too boring.
Malcolm (Mr Gadget)
