I met with Rob Knox from the Department of Geography last week. He explained what .kml and .kmz files are for and how to integrate GPS information with Google Earth. He showed me GPS tracking units and examples of the way he’s tracked walks and bike rides using them. It was very productive, and right afterwards I found an app for my phone that allows me to export GPS data to Google Earth in a .kmz file. So this is what this morning’s walk to work looked like on Google Earth:
I’m going to keep testing this app to see how much battery life it uses, but I might take Rob up on his offer to borrow a GPS unit for my walk in Ontario in June. I’ll have to test that thoroughly, too, if that’s the direction I decide to take. However, I like the images this app produces through Google Earth much better than the ones made by the app I’ve been using to map my walks (called, not coincidentally, “Map My Walk”), even if it’s a little more complicated to create them. When I look ahead to my walk in June, I think it will make a lot more sense to include a picture rather than a map. I’ll be walking through territory that originally belonged to the Six Nations, and I can’t help thinking there’s something a little dodgy, politically speaking, about being a settler and mapping that space. An image, though, feels different.
In other news, it looks like I broke my pinky toe, again, on my first walk on the Old 16 Road loop. I remember feeling a sudden shooting pain in my foot, and that must be when it happened. That toe has broken many times before in the last 25 years; it’s something I just have to live with. Sometimes, if my boots are too tight, it will break when my foot swells during a walk. I’m not too worried–the same toe broke about six weeks before I walked the Camino de Santiago and it healed before I left, despite all the training walks I took–and although it’s too swollen to fit most of my shoes, it still fits into my hiking boots. Really, that’s all I need. That, and ibuprofen, and I should be fine.