Making a personal road trip map

Yesterday, I talked about the Box-o-Goodies I packed each kid for our road trip, which included a "Personal Road Trip Map".  Today, I want to take the time to show you what it is and how I made it.

What the Personal Road trip map is, is simply a map outlining our trip.

I have chosen to keep it very simple, mainly because of the age of my kids.  It shows them where we are going and which states we are going through.

**Disclaimer- This map is not to scale**

Now how did I make this?

I should start by saying, I am guessing there is a simpler way, but I didn't have the time to research more or to figure out a program. But this is what I did...

I first started by mapping our route on Google Maps.  Once I was comfortable with the route I went over to 50 States.com and printed a state map for each state we were going to go through.

From there I started to cut and pieced the the states together.  Here is where I noticed the scale of each state was slightly off.  I had to make some adjustments, but it is close enough for the purpose of this project.

I kept them in two segments.  I then took each segment and ran it through the copy machine.  scaling them to fit a full page.

Now I had an outline of each segment to work with.  I wanted the sate outlines to be a tad thicker, so I took out the sharpie and traced the state borders. I also drew in our route.

Then through the copier it went again.

I pasted two larger sheets of paper together to get a good base for the road trip map.

The back sides of these sheets are white, and the perfect location to attach the state outlines.

Here is where I added a few landmarks along the way. 

Next I folded and titled the map...

And called it done.

I have left plenty of space on the map for stickers and pictures they may want to add.  I have also printed up some interesting state fact for each of the states we will be going through.  I found these factoids on 50 states.com as well.

Yes, there is a lot of cutting and pasting and running through the copier, but in the end it was a project I was able to complete in one evening.

-Laurie