Monday, April 25, 2011

Google Maps for Stadium?

So with all of this wonderful weather limiting my outdoor preparation for the upcoming Winona Horse Trials, I have asked my sister Leigh to send me the stadium courses early since I will be doing the maps myself this year.  I figure since I'm not a graphics arts person with all the fancy software I needed to get an early start.  Only one problem ...the tracks that Leigh sends me often don't quite end up looking like the rough drafts that she sends me so how could I do the maps before the courses were set?  That's when I thought about trying Google Maps like I started doing for cross country last year.  Wow, I think I'm on to something without spending a small fortune on the software.

I went to Google Maps and enlarged the stadium area and got out a dry erase marker and started drawing the course directly on the computer screen. Then I started drawing the lines which measure the distances and tweaked things around to the point where I think the lay out looks pretty good and I could make fairly accurate course maps. I did have to move one fence significantly to get the distance that Leigh wanted and I would not have discovered that  until we had gotten all the jumps into the field.

Time will tell if this is really going to make set up easier, but here's hoping and for now I'm a happy camper.  Well that was until I realized that we have one too many jumping efforts for three of the levels and have to decide which jump has to go.

2 comments:

  1. Wow! That is a brilliant idea to use Google maps! You just might be on to something!!

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  2. I'll let you know how it works after I set the course.

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