I have thought about traveling with a GPS device. So I can map my trip with Google maps. I went to Target and bought the Garmin eTrex GPS. It costs me $99.99+tax. This is a basic model that do not have the base map, which I can’t really use it in Asia. I don’t want to spend $$$ to buy high end model and spend extra $$$ to buy the map that I will probably never use. My idea is to mark as many waypoints as I can and load it on to the Google maps. Once the waypoints are converted to XML data file, it will be loaded into the Google maps API and display the stops and path of my trip. This is currently under experiment. There is no easy way to create the XML data file from the GPS device. Aslo, there is imposible to mark every corners, so the line between two far-apart stops looks funny.

So far, the Garmin eTrex GPS with Google map idea works OK. I plan to use this method to display my trip to Asia later this year. The only problem is that Google map has no detail map for Asia countries like China, Taiwan, etc. The Hybrid mode does NOT work very well. There are too much information to load in one tiny map window. I will play with this more and see how userful this idea will be.

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