Planning - lists and lists (and mapping software)

I spend a lot of hours at home, building lists of places to visit, then trying to group them together into a reasonable target list, usually for day trips, but sometimes for things like extended bike rides.

When I first started this quest, I was just going to visit Michigan official historic markers. The site for that is here:

https://www.michigan.gov/mhc/historical-markers

From there you can find the "explore the map" page (I'm not linking it directly here since it appears to be a dynamic URL).

There are > 1700 markers on that map. At the time I actually went through the markers one by one, by county, and put them into Gaia maps. Obviously this took many hours.

Unfortunately, for 2025 Gaia has upped their price to a ridiculous amount, it's like $90/year. So I'm dropping Gaia and moving to Maps.Me.

Later I moved to hunting markers from HMDB.org. This is a lot easier since they have an export function. I go to "Location" then drill down to an area, for instance a county, then use the export function to generate a CSV. I found an online CSV to KML converter here: https://mygeodata.cloud/converter/csv-to-kml

It does want X and Y instead of Longitude and Latitude in the column names, so a slight edit to the CSV file is required.

From there I just email the KML to myself, click on it in my phone and import it into Maps.Me

When I'm actually out hunting, I use the HMDB.org site on my phone, specifically the "Near You" button. And once I'm at a marker, I use the "other markers near this one" to hop from one to the next.

One downside to maps.me is that there's no browser/pc version which makes it a lot more cumbersome to do pre-ride planning, but I'm going to see how this goes. I may start using a tablet instead of a phone when out on a ride, so it's a bit easier to navigate.

One thing I haven't found a handy database for, which I also want to target, is museums. Some are big institutions, some are some person's garage.

Right now I'm just using Google Maps and web searches to try to assemble my target lists for museums, by county. 

Another important consideration is that a LOT of small museums have extremely limited hours. Some are only open seasonally. Some are run by a single person and they go on vacataion. So it's important to note open hours in the list.

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