Recently my father walked the “Camino de Santiago” and forwarded way points he had taken with his Garmin GPS with some notes about each point. I looked at the the Garmin output and it seemed I needed MapQuest to read them? Not too deterred and not wishing to wait for a copy of MapQuest I thought there must be a way to convert these files. A little bit of searching and I came across an amazing utility “gpsbabel”, that was able to cross covert many formats.

Once downloaded I then ran the following command:

[cci]gpsbabel -i gdb,roadbook -f sample.gdb -x nuketypes,waypoints,tracks -x transform,wpt=rte -o kml -F sample.kml[/cci]

where sample.gdb is from the Garmin GPS and sample.kml is the output file.

This KML file had data for both Google Maps and Google Earth (double the info I needed), so I manually removed one set and also added data to the name and description tags. So once I had a single KML file
with data like so for each way point:
Altos de Perdón

view in large map
However, if you are more interested in the walk, then check out this entry.
I created a google maps account and in “my maps”, then created a new map and imported the KML file. I made the map public to embed the map!
view in large map

download this shape as a PDF



Camera on and fly the jet...

Camera on, watch those cubes go...

All points created by exporting from a 3d package, position objects (cubes) at these points. Using Tweener, then make ‘em move on the mouse over action. Dynamically add the text to a movieclip – add movieclip to moviematerial and apply to plane. Have the plane face the camera and stick in a couple of event listeners…

Click on “BOOM” to make the cubes explode!