Touring - How can I make a map to show people what my route was?

In putting together some pictures, I want to include a map of what my route was this summer. The problem is that it was about 6000 miles, and Google Maps seems to max out at 20some waypoints, too few for me, so I can't show the entire thing as one single route on Google Maps. Can anyone recommend me a software or online website that can draw up a diagram of my route?

Have you tried:
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

If you have GPS information, try using http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/
If not, you can handroute it on http://www.mapmyride.com/

Hope that helps!

I don't have GPS information, and both of the other links only go point to point in a straight line (they can't follow roads), so I would have to hand draw out 6000 miles of route, no easy task.

We used this one for one of our tours http://www.bikely.com/
Dont know if you can put the whole 6ooo miles on it.

Bikely allows you to follow roads, but if you make a mistake, you have to erase point by point - pretty damn painful.

Steve

Have you tried:
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

I have been trying to use this map tool, but I can't figure out how to start marking on the map.

6000 miles? wow.

you can use the trips feature on enthoosed.com (http://enthoosed.com/bicycling). I haven't tried a trip that large though.

here's my houston-austin trip; not quite 6k miles.

http://enthoosed.com/bicycling/trip/profile.v?id=25149

Both Bikely and Mapmyride follow roads. I have used them and gmaps pedometer and bikely has worked far better for me. All seem to break down on really long rides.

Google maps may be able to do what you want though. Have you tried letting google maps generate directions from start to finish using the avoid highways option and then dragging the route points to your route? I know that the generated directions can have at least hundreds of turns.

Google earth can definitely do it somehow using GPS Visualizer, but I do not know the specifics or the limitations. Look at the adventure cycling routes plotted at:
http://tsteven4.qwestoffice.net/

I did one on http://veloroutes.org/

I'll try the others listed in this thread.

Bikely makes it pretty easy, you can map some, save the map and come back to finish it later. Plus it can generate an elevation profile graph for you to see how much you climbed and coasted :D

When you are drawing just make sure to click the box that says follow road. Other wise you'll be all over the place.

You could do it old school and draw it on a map ,take a picture,post it.You would be done now.

Bikely makes it pretty easy, you can map some, save the map and come back to finish it later. Plus it can generate an elevation profile graph for you to see how much you climbed and coasted :D

When you are drawing just make sure to click the box that says follow road. Other wise you'll be all over the place.

Have you actually done this for a trip of the length he is talking about? I find Bikely barely manages long day rides for me without screwing up at least the elevation data and usually the whole map. Mapmyride is better, but still impossible for a multi-thousand mile trip in my experience.

I think you might have trouble finding an online mapping solution that can plot a 6000 mile route on a single map in any amount of detail. Reason being, as far as I'm aware, all of these maps use Javascript to plot the points - so if you have more than a certain number (in the hundreds, usually) then you find the browser just grinds to a halt, since the line plot overlay is being done on the client side, in Javascript. That's really slow.

I implemented hooks into Google's map API on crazyguyonabike, and you can also plot lines on the maps now - either manually (point by point, just click on the map) or else you can upload a GPX file of trackpoints from GPS if you have that. To get around the "sheer number of points" problem with GPX files, I filter out some points in order to reduce the total number, which also makes the line less detailed (i.e. if you zoom in then it may not appear to follow all the twists and turns faithfully). To make this more flexible, I have a "granularity" setting on the upload, where you can opt for either more points (slower to render, but more detailed) or fewer points (faster rendering, but less detail) on a sliding scale. See the Help over on crazyguyonabike if you're interested in seeing more:

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/website/help/#maps

If you're plotting the points manually, then one way to do this might be to use several different maps, each one zoomed into a different part of the trip. If you did this on a journal page, then you can have several maps on the one page, or split it up over multiple pages, your choice. Either way, it might allow you to give people an idea of where you went. A 6000 mile route, following all the twists and turns of roads, that will have a *lot* of points to plot on one single map - probably much better to split it up over multiple maps for different portions of the route.

Having said all that, you could of course also make a single "overview" map which has a route line that isn't even trying to follow the roads, but simply connects the different places where you stopped for the night. That probably comes to a hundred or more points by itself, and if the route is over the USA (for example) then all those points strung together will look pretty ok when you're zoomed out to view the whole country.

Neil