Plan Your Walking Route With Google Maps
Cross-posted from Geeky Traveller.
Cartographic scale can be a surly temptress. Occasionally I’ll be foiled by a poor-quality map in a guidebook or brochure, and end up walking six kilometers to cover an inch of map. GPS-enabled geeks don’t have this problem, but we can’t all travel to Tuscany with a utility belt.
If you’re looking for a simpler solution, check out the latest Google Maps hack, gmapPedometer:
As a runner training for a marathon for the first time, I found myself wishing I had an easy way to know the exact distance a certain course is, without having to drag a GPS or pedometer around on my runs. Looking at Google Maps, and knowing there was a vibrant community of geeks hacking it, I knew there had to be a way. So here it is.
It’s a great hack, and works very smoothly. Here’s a route I commonly take to work in Vancouver. Here’s a route I used to walk to work when I lived in Dublin.
Feature requests for future versions of gmapPedometer: allow me to enter a beginning and end address and then let me draw the route in-between, provide distances in kilometers as well as miles and let me annotate points on my route (bonus points for geo-locating Flickr phtotos).
Geordie 
James