This post is a combination experiment, tutorial, and update on Team Anderson’s plans for next summer.  We’ve previously announced that our plan for the coming year is a nine month tour in Europe: spring in France, summer in the UK, and then autumn back in France again.  As a way to pass the time while we’re waiting out the rain we’ve started refining this plan over our initial brainstorming idea and it’s starting to feel like something that actually holds together.

Here’s the current thinking on the UK portion of the tour, which is quite different from the initial vision.  This one stays entirely in England and Wales, beginning in Poole after catching the ferry from Cherbourg and ending in Dover and the ferry to Calais.  Including Ireland as we originally envisioned felt like it was covering too much territory, so we’ll save the Emerald Isle for another tour.

So that’s the news update.  The experiment was to see if it is possible to include multiple routes in an embeddable map, rather than just creating a static image of a multi-route map and including that as a picture.  The experiment was inspired by this forum post submitted by Susan Shore, who asked if anyone knew if this was possible.  I’ve wondered that myself, but have never bothered to do the research.  

The experiment was a success, as you can see.  Note that it’s dynamic, and you can select and jump to the individual maps in the collection using the scroll bar at the bottom.

So, the tutorial.  RideWithGPS has instructions on this here, but it’s pretty straight-forward once you know how to create an Event.  Briefly, these are the steps:

• Create an event (an update: I added this post to the Forum thread to describe how to create and work with events); 
• Add to it all the routes you want included in your multi-route map;
• Click the Share button at the top of the event;
• Select Embed Map;
• Select Default To Show All;
• Copy the embed text, and paste it into the map box in your journal post.

If you have any questions, let me know.

Oh, and if anyone has thoughts on this as a proposed itinerary feel free to speak up.  My knowledge of England was really pretty thin when we started imagining this tour, but I’ve got a few more ideas to work with by now.