Displaying Your Tour On a Google Map Using GPS Data

[richie thornger]

Something I have found great difficulty in doing until now is displaying all the recorded rides from my Garmin GPS on a single zoomable map.
Over the months I have been on tour I have found various workarounds that have involved printing the screen but this means you have to keep updating, screen printing and uploading. It also means you end up with a static non zoomable picture of a map rather than one that you can go and look at in detail
ie: Google Maps

I've now found a couple of ways to do this:
1. Strava Multi Map
2. Activities

The Strava Multi Map is a 3rd party program that enables you to put rides from your Strava account onto one map.
Unfortunately this seems to have stopped working for the time being so I will concentrate on Option 2.

"Activities" is a 3rd party site that only works with Garmin.FIT files at the moment but they are going to enable you to upload .GPX files at some point in the future. My Garmin Edge 800 uses .FIT files, my Garmin Edge 705 did not and used .GPX
This site is in it's infancy and I'm sure will have everything you need in time. At the moment it does the job and for me that's better than no job at all

So if you record your route on a Garmin GPS here is what you do.

Go for a ride between 2 days and perhaps 2 years recording your routes as you go.
Register on the site at http://www.irreverence.co.uk/activities/
When done you will be able to upload data in one of two ways.
via the Garmin Connect website or from your device plugged into a USB port.
Scroll down the home page until you see "Upload your Activity"
Then follow the instructions for loading a single ride from a Garmin Connect url
or click on the link to load multiple rides from your Garmin Device.

I've successfully loaded the rides from my Sri Lanka tour so far using the Garmin Connect method.
This did work out as quite a slow way when you have more than a few rides you want to upload.
In order to do this you must make sure the rides in your Garmin Connect account are "unlocked" open to be viewed by everyone. You can change this back after.
Unfortunately I can't seem to find a way to unlock in bulk so you have to unlock each ride individually.

When the rides have uploaded to the site you can click on the "map" page and see your rides all displayed on a single Google map. The address for the map can then be linked to from your blog/Facebook/forum and whenever you update the map your viewers will see the updates immediately.

Although the process of uploading a large quantity of rides is a bit of a pain this way it can be done and does work.

The 2nd option is to upload from your Garmin Device plugged into your PC.
I'm still trying to get this option to work smoothly as it's in beta and I'm waiting for some answers back from Kenny who runs the site. When I have a better overview of this method I will update.

When your map is done you can change where the map centres on, the zoom level and a few other things via the "preferences" page.

Hope this helps anybody wanting to display a multi-day ride in detail.

If you know of any other options for displaying multiple rides on a single map let's hear them.
Richie

Link below takes you to my world tour map.
 I'm working backwards on updating it so it will centre around Sri Lanka at the moment.
http://www.irreverence.co.uk/activities/map/?user=77ddb670

[Danneaux]

Very, very nice discovery and thread, Richie. Very useful to me and to others, I am sure. What a great find, nicely shared.

Please keep us updated if things move forward from here.

Well done, and thanks!

All the best,

Dan.

[richie thornger]

I have successfully uploaded 20+ rides in .FIT format directly from my Garmin Edge 800.
It's taken a few goes for this to work but that may be to do with my internet connection being flakey here in Sri Lanka.
It took about the same time to upload them this way as it did to link to each file manually from Garmin Connect but of course I didn't have to do anything once it had started.
So just to confirm this method does work but only with .FIT and not with .GPX

If you have .GPX files you can get around this by uploading them to Garmin Connect and then transferring them in the same way as outlined in the previous post.

[richie thornger]

I've now loaded all of my cycling rides from my 2012/13/14 tour so far. These can be seen in blue.
I then went to preferences and changed the colour to yellow and went about the process of uploading my non-cycling routes as well.

I decided to choose a different colour for each type of transport.
Blue for bicycle
Yellow for boat
Red for car/lorry/bus
Purple(ish) for plane. I wanted to use black but the colour chart wouldn't let me in the activities program.
Train - undecided??
Camel/Elephant/Donkey - TBA

I then re-created the non-cycling route (flight/boat/bus etc) in www.gpsies.com and saved it as a .GPX Track it has to be a track and not a route or it will not upload to Garmin Connect)

I then used the manual upload in Garmin Connect to upload this .GPX file and added the dates and times etc manually in Garmin Connect.

Then I downloaded the new file to the "Activities" website to go on my map.
http://www.irreverence.co.uk/activities/map/?user=77ddb670


At this point the "Activities" website can only change the colour of the rides before you upload and not after.
So I did all my boats, changed colour, did all my bus, changed colour etc.
(still lots more bits to add from routes that are part bike/part something else because I forgot to turn off the Garmin ! )

A problem I have come up with using this method is that Garmin Connect has a mileage maximum. I'm not sure what it is. But when I tried to upload my flight from Luton to Istanbul it rejected it
So no flights on my map until I can come up with a way to get round that.

Obviously this is all a rather cumbersome way to go about things but it seems to be the only way I can find at the moment.
The fact that I'm sat on the beach in Sri Lanka whilst working this all out does make it a lot less of a chore

[Danneaux]

Hi Richie!

Well done! I do see the map takes a lot longer to load now with the extra data, but comes out nice and clear.

Richie...where did you get the GPS data for the non-cycling portions of your journey? Did you trigger your Edge at start and end, or...what?

Looking good.

All the best,

Dan.

[richie thornger]

as above Dan
 "I then re-created the non-cycling route (flight/boat/bus etc) in www.gpsies.com and saved it as a .GPX Track it has to be a track and not a route or it will not upload to Garmin Connect"

Also I've noticed the problem with the maximum mileage in Garmin Connect only comes about when doing a "Full Edit" but not with a "Quick Edit"

Everything takes a long time to load here so I wouldn't have noticed the length of time on the map.
I've contacted Kenny at the site to ask about how you can do multiple maps ie one for each country.
I'm waiting on a reply.

By looking at the shadow of the coconuts in the palm trees on the beach and cross referencing this with the way the dogs legs are pointing I reckon it must be lunchtime.

[Danneaux]

as above Dan

Got it, Richie, many thanks!

Enjoy your beach-time, and all best wishes your way, 

Dan.

[richie thornger]

So if you look at my map now you will see I have most of my data on except road transport.
I just did this by uploading different methods of travel with different colours chosen in the preferences.

If you want to not show certain items you can untick them in the "activities" page.

I'm going to suggest an idea of having a bulk switch to enable/disable certain colours. That way you could have layers. Just show cycling or boat or elephant etc.

One thing this site doesn't do is show the map when you link to it on Facebook which is a shame. FB People look at pictures but ignore writing it seems or is that just my friends;)
On a serious note about the above I've been using FB to keep in contact with friends I've made along the way and quite often they can read little or no English even if they can talk it. A picture definitely is worth a thousand words.

Although my personal map has taken a lot of hours to cobble together the various versions of data I had. It is now done. And adding each new ride will be pretty painless.

Something else I Cant do on my particular blog (wordpress) is embed a webpage.
This has nothing to do with "Activities" . Ideally I'd like the map to be on my site ready to view rather than having to click on a link. Thought I'd put that here in case people are looking at this pre-tour and wondering about best way to stay in contact with the world.

I personally think there is massive scope for a pre made site/blog/platform just for road trips that allows you to upload news/photo/videos/GPS routes etc. It's not just cyclists who go on multi day trips and want to tell the world. There is stuff out there but none I've found allows you to upload GPS data.
*Actually I lie. Garmin adventures does just this but crashed after more than 10 rides/days activities.
Clearly Garmins idea of an adventure is different to everyone elses. It also had a load of gumpf that I didn't like displaying when you linked to it. The "Activities" option is a lot cleaner with just the map showing.

I must also mention that when my Garmin Edge 705 broke around Germany. You will note my "Activities" map has a slightly different colour from rides onward of the fault to Istanbul. All these routes were painstakingly added manually when I got back from Istanbul. Because I was following Thomas Stevens diary for this part of my trip it was a lot easier to be able to go back after the event and recreate the rides.
The frustrating thing about the Garmin breaking was that it was still recording but I was unable to get the data off the device because the USB port had failed. This is why I suggest if you are able, to set the device to record to memory card instead of the device itself. That way you can still access your data.
And no Garmin said they couldn't save it?? True / Lazy/?? I don't know??