Today, while trying to help one of my friend plan his Yellow Stone trip, I created a Google Map of one of my most memorable road trip (image below). For long, I have been thinking of creating a map of this road trip and today, finally, I got a chance and reason to do it.
Creating the map of my road trip was a piece of cake. It took me less than five minutes to generate the map. I just went to Google Maps, clicked on driving directions, gave the starting and ending locations and kept adding destinations. However, to my surprise, I realized that there is no way to save the map in “My Maps”, a feature that Google rolled out for quite some time now.
Initially, I though that I am missing a button or a link that will say “Save to My Maps”. This is an obvious feature for a company like ‘Google’ which believes in simplicity and integration, it is highly unlikely that they missed out this simple feature. However, after scanning the whole page almost for 10 minutes, I gave it up and started googling.
Here is what I discovered,
- There is no way to save driving direction to ‘My Maps’.
- The only way to do that is export direction as KML file and then import them in my maps. However, if you have multi-destination, which is in my case, there is no way to export KML file. Someone wrote a script to do that, but the server isn’t working anymore :(
More details on this topic can be found from this forum discussion.
Man..now I will have to wait more before I can finally create a nice map of my road trip :(
Memento 
Yep, I keep trying to do the same and am always amazed that there is no link/way to do it. Arrgghh.
In case you haven’t figured this out by yourself already, I send/save *maps* and *directions* by copying the url from the “Link” on the top right of my google maps screen – This url is updated for each destination/route change etc.