I’m back from a road trip and feeling refreshed! But also irritated because Google Maps makes it so dang hard to create and save maps these days, and to access old ones I created a few years ago. Ugh! So as part of my process of figuring it out, I figured I’d make a blog post of it. Hell maybe you guys can help me.

Old Google Maps was cool

Starting maybe 10 years ago I created and saved a whole bunch of maps which had great features. I loved using them for things like, tracking road trips and calculating mileage; tracking the mileage of my neighborhood runs/walks; marking businesses or places you want to visit; etc. Here is one, with places in New York I wanted to visit; must have been 2008 or so:

Here’s one showing a driving route between Albuquerque and Cincinnati, OH.

Here’s one with the shooting locations for a music video our band made. It was really useful as we could share the map with everyone involved with the video and get them to very specific locations with much less effort and room for error as giving verbal directions.

Then Google-plus came along and fucked everything up.

But then, Google Maps changed

Now all my old maps are hard to access, especially on my phone. Which blows! I want to create maps using my laptop, then save the maps, and have them easily accessible on my phone using Google Maps app. Note to self: I should check the version of Google Maps on my iPhone as maybe it’s out of date. In any case, I have not been able to easily load my saved maps on my iPhone; I can access them, but I need to use Safari to go to maps.google.com to do so. I’d much prefer it to be handled through the app that that comes with the iOS.

I’m also having trouble creating and saving maps using their current interface. There seems to be no way to save maps now; you can either print them or get a link to share or embed. There’s no way that I can find to save maps and name them, as I did years ago on pre-Google-plus Google. The best I can do, far as I can figure, is keep the share and/or embed link to access the map.

The other thing is that I can’t add more than 10 total destinations (i.e. the final destination, plus 9 sub-destinations). Kinda lame you can’t have an unlimited number of destinations, as before.

So the best I can come up with right now for mapping out the road trip we just did is here, in this embedded map:

Note we are not stuck in Hannibal, Missouri, but I can’t add more than 10 total destinations so I guess I’ll have to create another one from Hannibal to Albuquerque. There must be a better way, right? Please help me in the comments.

Thanks in advance! It’s great to be home!