Mark Twain once said that golf is a walk spoiled.

I took a walk recently. I didn’t spoil it with golf, but I did embellish it with overengineering.

A simple stroll, correctly overengineered, becomes a Sacramento Map Blog nerdfest.

The walk itself was in the Fabulous Forties, one of my favorite Sacramento neighborhoods. In fact the walk was an event, sponsored by the Sacramento Walking Sticks. The nice Volkssport folks have been overengineering walks a lot longer than I have, and at one time I used to like going on many of their events.

Turning this walk through the Fabulous Forties into a map blog nerdfest took a bit more doing. First, going out there, naturally I needed to use the new TomTom, which got me there just fine, as expected.

Once there I was pretty much in walking mode, so I picked up my event map in the designated location and got going. I was originally going to take a set of Fabulous Forties pictures, but getting out there, I realized I didn’t have as much time as I wanted. Moreover, the best photos I could have taken were of peoples’ houses, and as much as I wanted to embellish the walk with overengineering, the walk was still more important than getting a bunch of photo releases. So for the walk I was pretty free of any special technological trappings.

Once home, though, of course I wanted to map out the walk, so I first had to find an application to draw the points. It turns out the Gmaps Pedometer was just the thing. This application allows you to draw your waypoints, ticking off the miles (and, optionally, the calories) as you go.

Clicking through from there to the GMaptoGPX utility showed how to convert the map route into a GPX (a standard format for GPS data — more on GPX here).

Once you have the map data in GPX format, you have created a file that is the perfect food for the outstanding free GPSVisualizer web site. Among other things, you can create the map above.

Of course, how overengineered would a walk be if all we got out of it were one image and one data format? GPSVisualizer doesn’t stop there, but allows you to get your data into KML format so Google Earth can read it. (In principle you can also create Google Maps directly but I’ve had less success with this feature). So having driven to your walk using a GPS device, you can then plot your walk on a map, store it as GPS data, then convert that data into a Google Earth to “fly” there in Google Earth.

Can we generate the GoogleMap from GPSVisualizer as well? Sure we can.

One walk. Three maps. Two data formats (three if you count the Javsascript for the map).

So much for golf.