Let's introduce ourselves
Nice to meet you!
We are Chantal and Andreas van Hooijdonk from Belgium. Many years ago we found out that we could use our free time much more efficient when we planned for our trips. Long and short.
We have always loved to find spots that we never visited before or to find back places where we had been in the past. Especially in a foreign country. That is why, already in 1996, we used a GPS receiver to find our way. Our first GPS receiver did not have maps incorporated, so we used it to read our coordinates and on paper maps we were able to find out where we were at any moment. This was maybe rather elementary, but we had a lot of fun and learned a lot too. So, finally in 2004 we created our own website about GPS, called "gps-practice-and-fun.com".
Satellite view
But even with the most sophisticated modern GPS receivers, the basic problem of planning a trip remains the same. You need a satellite view of a region, or whole country to know where are points of interest (POIs) that are important to you. We have developed a method to do exactly that. End of January 2008 we already have 15 categories, worked out on this site. Many are in preparation.
Google Earth
The principle is that for many categories we have found out the exact locations of every point in the category. The GPS-Coordinates of all those points are saved in a .KML file that can be read in Google Earth. Not every reader will have the same interests for different categories, but you can switch on and off as many categories as you wish.
All points that interest you
This way all points of all categories, each with its own icon, can be layered on one satellite image. Displaying every point for the whole of Belgium does not make much sense, as your computer screen will be one big crowded "painting". But zooming in on a surface of, lets say 20 times 20 km around place "P", where you stay during your vacation, will show all points that interest you in one image. And you will see that not far from that beguinage that you wanted to visit anyway, there is a magnificent castle and on the way to one of them you pass very close to an old wind mill.
Plan your own trips
With this overview you can plan very precisely as many day trips as you may ever want to do. We used this method for a one week vacation in the eastern part of Belgium and we can tell you that in one week we have visited more points that were of interest to us than we would have been able to visit in one month without the overview.
POI files for GPS Navigators
We have created and installed POI files for Navman, Tomtom, Destinator, and Route66. All this works great. This means that you can upload to your GPS Navigator (stand-alone device or navigation program on PDA, pocketPC phone, or Smartphone) files for every category that might interest you. Being guided to a particular point becomes as simple as clicking on a point in a list and telling your GPS Navigator whether you prefer reaching it along the shortest or the fastest road and it will guide you, even to a splendid view or wind turbine park that do not have street addresses.
How to contact us?
If you have a question about all this stuff or an idea of how we could do it better, or maybe you want to let us know that we did a great job, please do not hesitate to contact us by means of the form below.
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