Planning a vacation with Map View

[esm90]

Hi all,

I thought it would be interesting to share how I recently used the Map View plugin to plan a complicated 3-week family vacation to London, and how it became a priceless tool that wowed friends and family over and over again…

Basic Structure

Usually, when I use Map View to plan an activity, I put in one note all the relevant geolocations or links to notes that represent locations.
But this trip plan was huge, with hundreds of places I wanted to use. Some examples include…

• Recommended activities (found via multiple blogs, Google searches, TripAdvisor and friends’ recommendations)
• Recommended restaurants
• Coffee places (I’m a coffee geek and must have a proper coffee shop nearby at all times!)

I also needed to see on the same map key points like the house we rented, the gym we registered to, the place I’m picking up the car for a few days out of the city, etc.

To make this reasonably structured, I created the following notes:

• London 2022 (index) - includes basic geolocations like the house address, car rental pickup, gym etc.
• London 2022 Food - contains all the restaurants I found that seemed relevant to our needs.
• London 2022 Activities - museums, kids-recommended activities and other things I considered that we do.
• London 2022 Norfolk Adventure - a separate note for a 5-day road trip to a more country-side area, with its own activities, restaurants and key locations.

In each of these I entered lots of information about many kinds of places. For example:

## Best Vegan Restaurants
- [Holy Carrot](geo:51.4992203,-0.1601454)
- [All Nations Vegan House](geo:51.5496703,-0.07431190000000001) - sounds very special
- [Unity Diner](geo:51.51684540000001,-0.0736917)
- [Lele's](geo:51.5516454,-0.0516837) - vegan pastries and cakes
- [Gauthier](geo:51.5127566,-0.1314549) - the first Michelin-starred venue with a vegan tastings menu
...
## Pizza with Vegan Options
- [Tank & Paddle](geo:51.5109443,-0.0809249) tag:food/pizza
    - [Tank & Paddle](geo:51.5207722,-0.0790765) tag:food/pizza
- [Pizza Pilgrim](geo:51.5149341,-0.1332274) tag:food/pizza
- [Pizza Pilgrims](geo:51.5116021,-0.1267416) tag:food/pizza
...

#food

Naturally I didn’t type the geolocations manually; I used the “add inline geolocation link” command (that I personally map to Alt+L) and typed the names as I found them over the web.
Note how I tagged the whole note #food, but also tagged individual lines with tag:food/pizza (an inline tag). This allowed me to configure a special icon for pizza places, which is really important

Also, I have a special tag #not that I find useful. When I read about a place that I find unsuitable for our needs (most commonly nowadays if I read reviews that it’s unsuitable for young children), then instead of removing it, I tag it with #not and give it a different color. This way if the place comes up in a conversation or if I see it nearby, I can easily rule it out.

- [Stonehenge](geo:51.17888199999999,-1.826215) tag:not
    - NOT interesting for toddlers, see [here](https://www.welshmum.co.uk/stonehenge-with-a-toddler/).

Plugin Setup

Map View comes with pretty sensible defaults, but there are two things that I think are worth sharing in the context of this showcase.

Marker Icon Rules

Here are my relevant marker icon rules:

Notice how #not only colors something black without affecting its other properties. So an #activity that is also tagged #not will have the running person icon, but a black background.

Query Format for “follow active note”

Remember how I used a two-level note structure for this project? I want to utilize this to quickly show all the geolocations linked from the ‘London 2022’ note.
This is accomplished using the following setting:

Voilla! Now when I choose “Focus note in Map View” from the index note menu, it translates to the query linkedfrom:"London 2022.md", which shows all the geolocations linked from the index note.
(I could of course also used an unfiltered view with no query at all, but that would also show markers in London from many unrelated notes, which may not be what I want here.)
(And I could also use a Preset with the same query, that’s just as great.)

How it Looks Eventually

It looks so great!
Here’s a screenshot from a small area to get some impression.

What I Did with all of That

Here comes the fun part, which is to utilize all this great wealth of data in order to plan an awesome vacation

Planning ahead of time was a breeze. Seeing in a glance what restaurant or coffee shop to couple with each activity was incredibly useful. I was able to make plans for each day that included nearby places, or plan routes extremely efficiently.

Things I use often…

• Filters - e.g. when I’m focusing on an activity and want to find a restaurant that will accompany it, I will add AND tag:#food to the filter in case the map is too busy as it is.
• Open in Google Maps - I very open use Google Maps together with Map View to estimate walking or transit distances between places.

But the actual superpower was about handling the unexpected, and that’s where having Map View in my pocket really wowed.
There were several occasions where things didn’t go quite as planned. Because the baby was too tired for the next activity, because a restaurant was closed, or because we were hungry in an area we didn’t plan to eat at.
In every one of these cases, having Map View in my pocket seemed to my family and friends like a superpower. In a matter of seconds I was able to locate where we are, come up with everything interesting I knew in advance was in the area, and find instant solutions.
Of course I could also do that with Google Maps (e.g. search for restaurants), but there’s a vast difference between finding a highly-ranked restaurant and a restaurant that I marked as great for us.
I’m a data geek and my family deserves to enjoy that – finding a restaurant nearby is easy, but finding an amazing restaurant, in an area I’ve never been before, thanks to a thorough research – that’s the game I wanna excel at!

[lonelywolf]

This looks absolutely amazing!! Thanks so much for sharing.

Did you use this mostly on desktop or mobile? If mobile, how did you manage to get thing to open in Google Maps easily?

[esm90]

I use both intensely, but I do most research on desktop, so that’s where I usually enter most of the data and do the more high-level research.
There’s an “open in Google Maps” action that comes by default and should work out of the box, at least in Android. If for some reason it doesn’t, “open in” actions are configurable.

[dmantula]

Let’s imagine one of the POIs is worth creating a separate note. Like [[Colosseum (Rome)]]. Then in the Colosseum note you set a location in the YAML frontmatter (as it has apparently a unique location). I would love if linkedfrom: would pull the frontmatter locations of referenced notes.

[dmantula]

Ha-ha. I asked and then found the resolution myself The issue was that I had spaces in the names of the note. So the embedded map should have quote escapes like this: "query":"linkedfrom:\"Rome 2023.md\""

[Gnossos]

Terrific job! It must have been lots of work, but the result is well structured and works well. Thank you!

But I do have a few questions:

1. Your map has several green circles with numerals in them. What do these symbols represent, and how did you add them to your map?

2. Suppose your vacation included a train trip from London to Cardiff, where you would rent a car and drive it to Manchester through the amazing, charming Welsh countryside. Ideally, your map would highlight the train route and then your driving route; it would also label the routes with icons specific to each mode (I believe fa-train & fa-car.) Can one do this with Map View? How?

3. For simplicity I described an ideal solution in #2. But short of this are other, less perfect solutions. For example: (a) just number destinations in order and enable them to be clicked to see their names, (b) draw straight lines between destinations and add mode icons, (c) use notes to display text substituting for visual cues, etc. If the ideal solution in #2 is not possible (yet) with Map View, what’s the second-best solution?

4. Google Maps lets one ask for directions and then displays the route on the map. Is there some way to import such maps with Map View and combine them for all legs of a complex itinerary?

5. For an itinerary like the one described, it would be desirable to have maps at different scales. E.g., one showing the entire UK for the entire itinerary and then several local maps for specific cities (London, Cardiff, Manchester, etc.), which would open by clicking on the city icon for the individual city. I’m not sure how to implement this in MV. Can it be done? How?

6. As is usually the case, I’m trying to learn Map View by using it to solve a problem. In this case, it’s planning a vacation trip in Japan. I’m able to get things working to mimic what esm7 does for vacationing in the UK, but the labels on my maps are all in Japanese, with Kanji characters. In contrast, if I use Google Maps, the labels use English characters. For example, searching for “Shibuya Crossing” in GM yields a map with extensive English labels, including “Shibuya Scramble Crossing.” But if I use MV’s “add inline geolocation link,” to add a link to a map of “Tokyo” in an Obsidian note, when I click on the link the map appears, but all the labels are in Kanji.What’s causing this difference? Is it because I’m using the default map source, Open Street Map? (I would try using Google, but setting up a Google Maps project is a non-trivial job. So, I first want to be sure I’m barking up the right tree.)

Thanks for your help!

[Muotki]

Map View is just a map with the possibility to add locations as pins, it does not contains any additional functionality like route planning or even routes between places.

When you have two locations close to each other and you zoom out the locations will be combined into one green circle with the number of locations at that spot. Zoom in and the individual locations will be shown.

[esm90]

Lots of points here, I’ll try to summarize a few topics at once:

1. Map View does not currently support viewing routes and other shapes on the map. It is a highly requested feature, so it will probably be added at some point. I believe this answers a few of your questions at once.
2. On a somewhat different note, there is a routing tool which launches an external site (by default Google Maps) – if you click on the map and choose a routing source, you can view the route in Google Maps to chosen destinations, as a shortcut for planning. That’s not what you asked for, but mentioning it just in case.
3. To save several local maps for specific cities, you can either use different notes (in big trips I like doing it this way, like the “London 2022 Norfolk Adventure” example I gave here, then embed the generated map in that note or keep a link to it. Alternatively, you can use multiple embedded maps in a central note, all with different views or filters. And another alternative would be to save presets that you can switch from the map’s Presets tab.
4. The default map source indeed lists labels in their local language, which is often not what you want. I personally like to have several map sources configured, which I use for different uses, including for this reason. See the documentation for how to configure map sources – it includes a link to a big list of various options, and also lists for some of them what language the labels are at. Some sources have all-English labels, and don’t be intimidated by these that require registration, they are usually free and easy to use. Alternative, you can use Google Maps as a map source, which works just fine. You can find its tiles URL online – unfortunately I can’t enlist it in the Map View docs because I don’t fully understand Google’s terms of use on this matter.