A Jet Lagged Vagabond Walk London: Speedy's Cafe to the British Museum

Back in August I posted a walk on the blog that I created called the Jet Lagged Vagabond's Sherlock Walk. The walk is comprised of all the filming locations in London for the BBC One show Sherlock. I saw all the filming information on the Sherlockology website, and then I cobbled together the locations that I thought would make a nice round walk on Google maps.

While I think the Sherlock walk I created is pretty fantastic (and by that I mean it is a walk I would LOVE to take - and I plan on trying it out this September when I am in London). I wasn't really happy with the way the walk looked on the blog. I am not a computer novice, but by no means am I one of these fancy programmers or able to make the GIFS I see on Tumblr that make me smile.

I have a lot of ideas for walks in a lot of places in the world. And I also would like to just sit down with a map and create a walk from scratch incorporating various themes, food, bars, historic locations, gardens -what have you.

So lucky for me I found a mapping class that was offered on the website Skillshare. I am now taking a class called Map Design: Learn to Communicate Places Beautifully, and these are a few things I have learned to embellish my Google Maps! Get ready for a lot of map posts!

I am revisiting my Sherlock walk to make it look better, and I will use this as my final project in the map class. I have taken a segment of the original walk - Speedy's Cafe to Russell Square and tacked on the British Museum at the end as this is a walk I would like to take when I am in London.

So the first thing I have learned is to embed a Google map into the blog- Huzzah!




View Walking directions from Speedy's to British Museum, London in a larger map


Here in the second attempt I added some icons.



View Speedy's Cafe to the British Museum in a larger map

On the map above I drew the lines myself (letting me plot whatever route I wanted to take) and added in the icons. Oh this is going to be fun!

Now I have learned how to take the Google map into Photoshop Elements and trace over it to make a drawing. Okay so it is not perfect. It may even look like a five year old doodled this, but it can only get better! I think with a little practice I will get going on a style I really like, and I hope to make some of these maps for my upcoming London trip! So now - on to the the final map class project and some practice time!