Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Cool Google Earth image of last night's MTB ride

I'm having fun playing with my new (Gregg's old) gps. Here's a cool image from Google Earth of the MTB portion of my ride last night.

Isn't that cool?! If you don't know the trails it might not seem as cool, but you can totally see my ride. Most of the ride was gravel road (all the smoother, straighter sections), and I went up Upper Horse (the squiggles to the right), and down Upper Dan's (the squiggles to the left).

I met up with Terry and his group on the road at the bottom of Upper Dan's, and rode with (or rather, behind) them to the top of Upper Horse. It was nice to see some familiar faces. Actually, it's always nice to see other lights moving around in the forest at night. Gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to know there are other people who enjoy night riding.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very cool indeed (that's my inner geek speaking!).

You've gotta spill the beans on how you do this though - equipment, how to get it imported into Google Earth, etc, etc.
Karl.

Stephanie said...

Ooh. I'd LOVE to spill the beans. I'm only moderately tech-savvy, so if I can do it anybody can do it.

I use a Garmin Edge GPS bike computer. I think you'd do exactly the same thing if you had their Forerunner, the runner model. Other GPS's probably have different interfaces, and they're all so different I wouldn't want to speculate too much on the what's and how's.

Garmin provides you a link to their "Motion Based" (www.motionbased.com), and you can automatically sync up your Garmin data.

From the Summary Data screen in Motion Based there's a link that says "Google Earth", that will allow you to save out a *.kml file to your directory. Name it and save it in a location where you can find it again.

Open Google Earth (or install it if you don't have it yet ... it's free). From Google Earth, open the *.kml file you just saved.

See. Easy as pie. And once it's in Google Earth you have options to "replay" the ride, and change the angle of view in all sorts of ways. It's cool, cool stuff.