My trips

I like to travel, so I have kept track of all my trips outside the Netherlands using the gnuplot plotting program on my site www.veerkade.com/trips  (site opens in a new window). Trips to destinations inside the Netherlands are not tracked because there are just too many of them. The older trips use latitude/longitude information taken from my own copy of the venerable Times Atlas of the World and for flights a custom great-circle distance gnuplot script was used. For maps of trips since 2008 a GPS track logger was used to record actual latitude/longitude information. Nearly maps use the CIA World DataBank III, a collection of world map data in the public domain, consisting of vector descriptions of land outlines, rivers, and political boundaries. Some maps, like the one to the left, use the World Vector Shoreline database, from NOAA/National Geophysical Data Center. I started keeping track of my trips in 1997; way before Google Earth (-; Please notice that the political boundaries in Europe changed in 1989; the international border between the DDR and Germany disappeared from the relevant maps. Shown here is the map of my first trip to the USA in 1983.

Below on the left a picture of the GPS logger I used for a couple of years. It is the Qstarz BT-Q100XT. It used to double as the GPS receiver for my old TomTom navigation unit. This little gadget has 66 channels and it fixes on an accurate position within seconds. The battery lasts forever. Recommended. Update: more recently I have been using the Canon GP-E2 GPS logger for this purpose. In addition to lat/lon it also writes altitude and shooting direction in the meta data of the photo. Nice!