Sunday, April 05, 2009

New Technology Helping The Old

Tonight, I finished the book I've been reading for a while - Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon. It's an incredible adventure filled with amazing, memorable salt-of-the-earth Americans. You can read my review of it on Goodreads, because I'm not posting here to review it.

No, I'm here to talk about another cool thing related to the book. I was browsing on Google Earth, trying to find some of the places Least Heat-Moon visited. It's neat to see them as they are now. It gives the book more meaning when you can see what these places look like (from above, at least). I decided to search for placemarks related to the book, and I found all of them!

Someone went to the trouble of making a Google Map of (nearly) all the places William Least Heat-Moon went during his "Blue Highways" trip. Of course, you can also view the map in Google Earth. You can save it and load it up whenever you want (when you're reading the book, for example). I've done exactly that.

The Blue Highways map can be found at this link. Click the "View In Google Earth" link at the top to load it in that application. Want to save it to your computer? Right click the folder once it shows up in your Temporary Places and select "Save Place As..."

If you haven't read Blue Highways, I highly recommend it. It's an amazing read. You can find it on Amazon.com here.

*update* The Google Earth file won't save to my USB drive! I hope it will save to my external drive. If neither option works, at least I emailed it to myself.

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