How to sketch a route and plan a multi-stop trip (no routing app needed)

Sometimes you do not need turn-by-turn directions — you need to quickly lay out where you are going. A sketched route is a series of points connected on a map: fast to make, easy to share, and perfect when the path is obvious or off-road.

When a straight-line sketch beats turn-by-turn

Routing engines are brilliant for "fastest way to drive there." But plenty of plans are not about roads:

• A walking loop through a park, where you choose the path, not an algorithm.
• A delivery or errand round with a handful of stops in a sensible order.
• A rough cycling or paddling line where you just want distance and shape.
• Marking a boundary, a meeting route, or a plan to hand to someone else.

For all of these, dropping points is faster than fighting a navigation app.

How to sketch a route

With My Location:

• Start a route from the map tools.
• Drop waypoints by tapping each stop in order — the app connects them as you go.
• Undo the last point if you misplace it, and name the route when you are done so you can find it later.

Planning a multi-stop trip

Add a waypoint for each stop in the order you intend to visit them, and you have an at-a-glance plan for the day — pickups, viewings, or a sightseeing list. Because it is your own sketch, you stay in control of the order instead of letting an optimizer reshuffle it.

Use your route elsewhere

A sketched route is real data, so you can export it as GPX or KML and open it in a GPS device, a fitness app, or Google Earth. (New to those formats? See GPX vs KML vs GeoJSON.)

Sketch, not turn-by-turn — on purpose

To be clear: this is straight-line sketching, not road routing. It will not calculate driving directions or follow the bends of a street — and that is the point. It is the quickest way to capture a plan and move on. When you want the full toolset, the features page has it, or just open the map and drop your first waypoint.