During our recent trip, I wasn't necessarily as diligent about updating everybody about our current position as I could have been. Therefore, you are excused if you aren't familiar with the exact route we took. In an effort to remedy this situation, I was playing with the Google Maps API, which is really very cool, and created a map that will help you visualize our trip.

http://hewgill.com/travel/usa-southwest/ or open map in new browser window

The blue line is the approximate path that we took, and the red markers are cities or towns or campgrounds where we stayed at least one night. You'll have to zoom in a bit using the standard Google Maps controls (sorry, keyboard shortcuts don't work right now) to get a better view.

We left the GPS on for as much of the trip as we possibly could. Whenever the track log filled up (every two to four days of driving, typically) I would download the track log to my laptop and clear it to start over. In this way, we have a detailed track log of our entire trip containing over 120,000 unique points!

This was far too many points for Google Maps to draw in a single polyline. So I had to massage the data a bit and reduced it to just under 200 points. This is why, when you zoom in a bit, it looks a bit chunky. However, it does give a very good representation of our trip and especially most of the little side trips we took.

I'm now back to working on the photos. For the last week or so, we've been very busy preparing the paperwork for our New Zealand immigration. It's a ton of work! But this morning we sent off the bulk of the paperwork via FedEx to London, so that is no longer on the top of my todo list.