Take a left onto Via Noalese, honey
Magda’s very excited to have a long-lost friend coming to visit today. It will certainly do her some good to have non-Adam company for a few days. The only problem is that this friend is arriving at an airport we’re unfamiliar with. That is saying something, given that in our time here we’ve become intimately acquainted with flying in to and out of the airports at Trieste, Ljubljana, Venice-Marco Polo, and Zagreb. We thought we knew every airport within a three-hour radius, but then comes word that the airport pickup is happening at Treviso. Time for Google Earth:
Zooming in on Google’s extremely high-resolution satellite photos, we were able to learn things that even our highly detailed map of Northern Italy couldn’t tell us: the name of the road she wants to take off the A4 (Via Ernest Hemingway) and if an interchange actually exists, where the road names (vexingly) change, whether the SR53 goes into or over a roundabout, and on and on. Even whether it’s possible to make a left turn from the SR53 onto the airport road (at left, it looks like it is). Combining these pictures with a road map makes it feel like you’ve already made the drive. Prior to this I’d only used Google Earth a handful of times and purely for entertainment. If you don’t have any mystery-airport pickup research to do but do have a broadband connection on a reasonably robust machine, I highly recommend firing it up for fun now and then. Go zoom in on the (still sinking) city of Venice (E. 12° 20″ 21′, N. 45° 26″ 02′ for Piazza San Marco, where you can see tourists casting shadows). Just across the Gulf of Trieste is the Slovenian peninsular town of Piran (E. 13° 34″ 72′, N. 45° 31″ 39′ to count boats in the harbor or cars parked around the elliptical marble piazza). What a cool tool for practical and playful reasons.
Now if we could get it in the car…
We just recently started “playing” with Google Earth and in no time at all it turned into favorite game for my two boys. They love to zoom in on the cities and look for people, cars and other things. Not to mention it is educational and it keeps them busy for some time, while I take a well deserved rest….Google Earth is definitely my best friend at the moment!
Comment by ka-ma — Thursday 23 March 06 @ 00.29 MST+2.00
Volkswagen and Google develop revolutionary navigation system
http://www.automotoportal.com/article/Volkswagen_and_Google_develop_revolutionary_navigation_system
Comment by Bostjan — Thursday 23 March 06 @ 21.20 MST+2.00