What is Google Earth?
Google Earth is a "world map" put together by Google using satellite imagery and coordinate system. When people first heard about it, workplaces suffered greatly from this. Those who downloaded and installed Google Earth, began looking for their own house, parents' house, vacation house, their friends' houses, the grocery store they shop at, the spot where they first fell in love or had their first fight with their spouses. Finding out when the images were recorded and who the cars parked in front of their houses belonged to became important missions and most people risked their eye-sight to find and perve on a couple snuggling on a beach. These were all perfectly justified and essential tasks for all those involved, up until they realized how long they have been lost in the Google Earth world, and only when woken up by their bosses who have already been there, done that. Following a period of "recession" which had a significant affect on the economy, Google Earth has become a permanent fixture in our lives. How to use Google Earth
You first need to install the software -preferably the beta version because it is free and unlimited- by clicking on the link below. The size of the file is 11.1 Mb. Depending on the speed of your connection download can take a while.
http://earth.google.com/
Once downloaded and installed Google Earth, you can follow our "Tracks" and view some points of relevance which we will record using our onboard GPS (Global Positioning System - which utilizes satellite signals to identify location/coordinates). You need to follow these steps:
1. Download and install Google Earth from the link above
2. Save and unzip our "track" file, which you can find to the left and that will be updated throughout our trip, to a certain location on your computer.
3. Start Google Earth, click "File" menu and select "Open".
4. Make sure that you see the file extension "Gps (*.gpx *.loc)" in "Files of Type" window. If not, select it from the dropdown menu.
5. Browse and find the file with the extension ".gpx" which you have saved in step 2. Left click on the file name, this should allow you to see the selected file in the "File name" box in the same window.
6. Click "Open". This will open the file and show you our tracks along the route recorded in that file and some important and relevant location information along those tracks. You can easily zoom into a point on the track and see what we've been up to.
We would like to thank Ali ERİÇ who is the man behind this idea and also the author of the instructions above. We can only express our deepest gratitude for this brilliant feature and please follow Ali on his trip to South Africa. Our tracks will most definetly, literally cross on our way down the continent.
