Tracing Road Trips

Your road trip poster can be transformed into a custom work of art by drawing in the trips you've taken with a marker. The video below can help you recreate your routes in Google Maps to use as a reference. It's also an excellent way to plan future trips!

With this reference you can look back and forth between your computer and poster, drawing one small section at a time to recreate your complete route.

On the poster, U.S. interstates appear in red and U.S. highways appear in orange. You'll find that most of your traveling tends to occur on these roads. For those journeys down the road less traveled, state highways also appear on the map in white. Due to scale and available space, these roads aren't labeled.

Road Trip Travel Poster

Mistakes can happen, but remember that the beauty of the map comes together when you take a step back and see the complete network of your travels- and minor errors won't take away from that. If you want to protect yourself from mistakes you can use a poster frame and draw on the clear plastic instead of the poster, or get the map laminated before drawing. We currently don't offer lamination services, so check with your local print shop.

Tracing road trips with a Sharpie

To achieve clean, crisp lines we recommend starting with a new black Sharpie. Put this marker aside for safe keeping so after your future trips you'll have it ready to go! We'd love to see how you're using your map, so be sure to tag @bestmapsever and #bestmapsever in any photos. Have fun on the open road!