Need directions to a meeting or the hot new restaurant across town? Want help planning a bicycle trek or a cross-country road trip? Curious about the location of your neighborhood or the small town your grandparents were born in?Wherever you want to go, whatever you want to find, mapping software and Web sites can make finding what you need easy and fun.
Find addresses instantly online
MapQuest, Yahoo! Maps, and Windows Live Search are among the most popular map sites on the Web. Enter an address and within seconds a color map of the location appears. You can zoom in for closer street information and get turn-by-turn directions to print out and take with you. Some sites calculate the number of miles from your starting point to your destination and estimate your travel time.
Steven Bernstein recently put these mapping functions to good use to find child care for his one-year-old daughter while he was out of town on business for a few months. "We used a map program to find out how close the day care that we got into was to the apartment we're renting," he says.
Plan detailed trip or jogging routes with map software
Installing a practical tool like Microsoft Streets & Trips on your computer can be very useful. It enables you to map routes that don't follow roads, map multiple destinations, send location information to your mobile phone, and find restaurants, landmarks, hotels, and public transportation stops in North American cities. It also gives you travel tips, such as how much gas you'll use getting to specific locations.
Paul Mero uses Streets & Trips to create jogging routes and track his time and distance. He likes being able to map routes that don't correspond with roads, such as footpaths through parks and along the edges of rivers.
"As a runner, one of the challenges is figuring out how far you've run and what your time is. Traditionally, people will jump in the car to figure out how far they're running," he says.
"And you don't want to do the same route over and over again. It gets boring. With this software, you can map out a bunch of five km or 10 km runs and pick which one you feel like running that day. You can also print them out and share them with your friends," he says.
Use map tools to simplify and enhance your everyday life
Maps are useful for far more than family road trips or driving directions. Try using these handy mapping tools in your everyday life. For example:
* Print maps to your child's party to enclose with the invitations.
*Map the carpool route that is used to transport your children and their friends to extracurricular activities like swimming lessons or hockey practice. Print a copy for each parent.
*Include maps in e-mail directions to your house when sending an electronic invitation
*Find out how far it is to walk different routes. Plan a "walking route" for each day of the week or to share with your walking group
*If you are an avid biker in a big city, use a map to find alternative side-street routes to your destination and to avoid the larger, busier streets at rush hour
*New to a city or area? Use maps to find the major routes to stores, your new job, and recreational facilities.
Consult additional resources
Mapping programs are handy and helpful, but they do have limitations. For example, they don't provide essential driving information that you may need, such as weather and road conditions and border crossing wait times. This information is available online. Check out the National Weather Service online and the information on Canada and Mexico border crossings on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection site.
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