Using Google My Maps to Plan a Trip

When our kids were little, we once passed a sign for a waterfall and our youngest piped up with "well there's another hour added to our trip".  LOL!  I do love to stop and see everything along the way on our trips. To balance out my need to stop at every interesting sight, with my husbands need to actually get where we are going, we plan ahead with My Maps.

It's a google app, separate from google maps, named My Maps.  This is the most awesome app ever. (I may say that about several apps.  Many of them made by google actually.  But I always really mean it.)

You can create as many maps as you want.  You can add many layers to each map.  You can add routes to maps, to show distances between locations.  You can color code locations, use different icons for different locations...  You can share your maps.  So when I create a map for a trip we are taking, I share it with my husband.  We can both then use the map to navigate to the locations.

You can go to  https://www.google.com/mymap and you can download an app for your phone.  The two sync, of course, this IS google after all.  :-)  

It's really just awesome.

Here are a few of my public maps, to give you some ideas:

Pa Road Trips - 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QvfavMSj4P7G80ZmXGDWKMAYrAI&usp=sharing

Columbia County Pa Covered Bridge Tour
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vP180EhBv9P9MmhITmlpticZ7iE&usp=sharing

The Pine Creek Rail Trail
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WBfhFICiTKJZ62lAM-jUrefCsJU&usp=sharing

Where to see the Elk Near Benezette Pa - 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1wvcY5EEx3ti5E8nNJpyKgU853hA&usp=sharing



Other Uses - 
My maps is also great for mapping out genealogy.  I've traced where our ancestors have fought in the civil war, and some of their properties, etc, along with homesteads, graves and places to visit.

It's also useful for geocaching.  Have you ever solved a BUNCH of geoart puzzles and then were not sure how to tackle them in a logical order?  Plug all the coordinates into mymaps and it's easy to plan your route.  :-)

And We Are Bottle Feeding Babies... Goats that is!

Meet Tom & Gerry.  Three times a day I lean out the back door and holler "bottles!" and they come running up the back porch.. so they might think their name is bottles.  LOL!

Tom is an orphan.  One of our nannies gave birth to him, and then a stillborn baby after him.  We moved her up beside the house just to keep an eye on her, and less than two days later she was dead.  We do not know why.  She didn't have any signs of being ill.  

So Tom lives in the pen beside the house currently, all by himself.  Although he has lots of visitors.  

And he can squeeze through the fencing still, so he often can be found playing in the back yard with the triplets.

Patty had triplets this year.  Just to be sure they were all getting enough to eat, we moved them back to the pen in the back yard, the "calf pen".  I'm glad we did.  We came home from church one Sunday to find one of the babies beside the backyard pond, being guarded by Jet (one of our big dogs).  She was soaking wet.  We assume she fell in the shallow pond and got back out..  but after we dried her off, it was obvious she was not getting enough to eat, so she gets a bottle 3x a day along with Tom.

Being carried in for a feeding during the Blizzard of 2017

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other

Dan sent me this photo this morning, with a note that all is well with the babies in the front pasture. Lol! Yes, that IS a chicken

Week One Without Home Internet

To Recap – Limitless, our internet provider, went bankrupt.  Windstream, our other option out here, has lines running to the farm that are so old and degraded that the signal barely gets here – the service is barely more than dial up, at High Speed prices.  We’re hopeful that River Valley Internets new tower will reach the farm, but it’s not turned on yet..  so rather than buy into one of the ridiculously overpriced, limited, options like exceed or hughes net (and we aren’t actually sure that either of those would work at the farm anyway…) we’re going to see how hard it is to live without internet at the farm. 

We have 25% of our phone data left, with 13 days left.  However, our daughter heads back to college, where she has constant unlimited wifi, tomorrow, so that will help.  (Our youngest is in air force basic training for 8 weeks – with no access to his phone - that is helping too.)

A quick look at my data usage shows that I’ve used 1.08gb on google chrome, .87gb on facebook, and .46gb with my phone as a mobile hotspot.

So my biggest issue is adjusting to not reading every article google now shows me.  I’ve habitually clicked on the links and read those stories without thinking about data usage, because before I was always on wifi.  Many of them are pure time wasters anyway.  The same goes for facebook – the majority of my usage there is clicking on links and reading stories people posted..  more time wasting that I really should work on eliminating anyway.

Meg has been downloading Netflix shows when we are on wifi, and watching them here at home with no wifi – it’s worked really well for her.  We haven’t tried casting to the big tv yet, she watches tv on her phone while she’s working on other things.  Currently we have so many shows on our dvr, there hasn’t been any need for us to look for more tv options.  But we might download the new lemony snickett movie when out on wifi today, just to see how it works casting to the big tv.

Tips For "Surviving" Without Home Wifi - 

http://fieldsofhether.blogspot.com/2017/01/tips-for-surviving-without-home-internet.html

Tips For “Surviving” Without Home Internet

Update - 4/20/17 - We still have no options for internet here.  BUT, thankfully, Verizon now offers unlimited data!!  I use my phone as a hotspot, as described below, and it works wonderfully.  It's faster than the internet we've had here in the past too.  The only thing we have not yet figured out is how to get Netflix on the big tv in the living room..  but we haven't really had time or inclination to work to hard at that, at this point.  

1. Use your phone as a hotspot.  I was impressed by how easy it is to connect my laptop using my phone.  Just remember to plug your phone in, it will drain your battery fairly fast.  On my phone (Samsung Note 5, Verizon Network) I simply chose “Mobile Hotspot” from the drop down menu, and followed the instructions.  After the key was added to my laptop, for future use all I had to do was click on the mobile hotspot button and my laptop automatically connected, as it does to any other saved wifi hotspot. 

https://www.verizonwireless.com/archive/mobile-living/tech-smarts/how-to-use-your-smartphone-as-a-mobile-hotspot/

2.      2. Know where the local free Wifi is.  For me, in Watsontown PA, I’m finding our local libraries, and The Well (At Christ Wesleyan Church) to be the best options so far.  But my moms house is also an option I took advantage of this week. Panera & Sheetz also have free wifi.  Our local Sheetz (Lewisburg) was sooooooooo slow, I left and went to the library instead.  This map may help, but it did not show our local libraries, so it's not a full list - 

https://wifispc.com/articles/free-wi-fi-near-me.html

        3. Download Netflix while on wifi.  This is a new option – you can download Netflix shows while on wifi, to watch when you do not have wifi.  This is also going to be great for long flights and while traveling in general… (Link to how to use Netflix on wifi)

             Update to the latest version of Netflix in the iTunes or Google Play app store.

 It needs to be a version that was launched on or after November 30, 2016.

Open Netflix on the device you wish to store content on.

Tap the menu button on the top-left side of the Netflix application.

Tap “Available for Download” in the list on the left side of the screen.

If it’s a movie or TV show, look for the download button.

( It’s a small arrow facing down to a flat line. Tap that.)

Once you have movies and TV shows downloaded, you’ll be able to access and stream them even when you don’t have a connection. 

  

        4. Keep a to do list for when on Wifi.  When I am on wifi, I don’t want to waste too much time.  So I keep a list of what I need to do.  Updates are pretty automatic, but I do check my phone to make sure I don’t have to authorize any updates before they occur.  I have my phone photos set to back up on google photos when I’m on wifi, so that happens automatically too.  But I need to be reminded to download new books to my phone, check the latest shutterfly deals, upload photos, etc.  I keep an entire folder on my laptop for when I am on wifi.  It has subfolders for blog posts I’ve written and will post when online, for photos I want to upload to facebook, and a notepad to do list of things I want to research and download while online.

5.      

      5..Use spotify.  Yes, it costs, but it also saves a lot for our family.  We can download our playlists to play offline.  Our data usage dropped significantly with the family subscription to spotify. https://www.spotify.com/us/download/other/

6.       6. Use an offline newsreader.  I'm currently trying Pocket - it has an app for android and an extension for chrome https://getpocket.com/a/queue/

7.       7. Make sure of facebooks “Saved Articles” feature.  Rather than reading every article that sparks your interest, save them for later.  Then when online, open the articles you have saved and save them to an offline newsreader.

8.      

My biggest inconvenience so far is my limited access to ancestry.com.  I’m not truly limited, I can use my phone as a hotspot – but I feel like I should limit that.  At a time of year when I usually spend a LOT of time on genealogy, this feels like a huge inconvenience, yet it’s probably a blessing in disguise.  I’m planning out trips to genealogy libraries in our area, most of which have free wifi, and I plan to make my rounds.  I can spend a day using both the wifi, and all of the resources in their libraries, for a little gas money and usually a $5 a day fee – and it will get me out to libraries I haven’t visited in awhile, where hopefully I will find more resources.