Traveling the world... without leaving your home

My son and I last night spent quite a while playing with Google Earth. We "flew" all over the place. We visited Tokyo Japan, and at my son's suggestion we turned on the "3D Buildings" little box on the side menu of google earth. it was AMAZING!!! We then went to China, and all over the place, just looking at places on google earth. We LOVE Google maps, especially the "street view" of things! The girls and I have used Google Earth to view European Cathedrals, Castles, and other really cool things.

On Google Maps, using the "Street View" We saw my oldest sons home, a fairly recent view of it, ours was pretty recent too, within the past 9 months or so we think.

For quite a while the views of our home were really OLD.. we could tell because in our back yard there were the kitchen cabinets which were removed from our home after our house fire in 2002. They were only out back a short time, but apparently that's when the google sattelites got the photo of our house, and that was the "view" of it for years... Now it's a much more recent photo, you can see the jungle gym, pool area, trampoline, storage bldgs, and my Honda Odyssey parked out front :)

We have looked at Louisiana, where the kids paternal grandpa is living. We zoomed down the street he is living on, using google map's "Street view" , and there at the stop sign is Grandpa's truck, with Grandpa sitting in it looking at the vehicle that is taking his photo. That was a hoot.


You can download Google Earth for free, and go ALL over the world, and using Google Maps, "street View" you can see a lot of places, just as if you were driving down the street in front of them!

Just had to share a really fun way to see places you might never visit in person, but CAN see just as if you were there!