Find an Adventure with...a Map!

Teaching kids to use a map of your local area

Recently my kids wanted to try and catch some guppies (little fish you find in creeks and ponds). I had no idea where to begin. All our favourite water spots are salt water. Surely there was somewhere local we could find some guppies?

I followed some inspiration from Alastair Humphreys, who uses a map to find a safe place to sleep overnight on his microadventures. I’ve used Google and Instagram to find local adventures from others, but had never thought to simply look at Google Maps and make my own. So here are the steps I took:

Using Google Maps to Find Awesome Adventure Spots Near You

1. Open up Google Maps and find your home. Use the basic view. I searched for little blue areas (water) that looked like small creeks or ponds.

Our family looking for guppies and tadpoles in a local pond - a nature spot we discovered using Google Maps

2. Zoom in and see what’s suitable. One of these was a private pond, so we took it off the list. The other three were accessible to the public, and two of them had proper walks through them for people to be able to visit the ponds. (I didn’t want to go somewhere with little kids and get told I shouldn’t be there by some angry old neighbour.)

3. Use street view to figure out if it will be suitable for kids, where to park, etc. One thing I checked for was whether or not the kids would be safe around the edge of the water, and would there be a spot they could look for guppies. Street view completely hid the water and instead showed trees, so I knew it would be shady and maybe a bit cold, likely damp enough for some mud etc. We could have skipped this, and gone and explored each of them, but I had a limited amount of time so I did all the work ahead of time. Also, when you click on a ‘place’, sometimes photos come up that others have submitted, so this helped me to pick which area we would visit first. Often streetview won’t be able to show you what’s there, but it does help for nearby parking!

4. Go explore!

I learned from this mini-adventure there are places all around we don’t even know about. I wouldn’t have ever learned about the duck ponds in the area, and none of my friends who lived in the area had ever mentioned them before. I wonder if that’s because these little spots are so simple that locals don’t talk about them? Or maybe they don’t see the hidden adventures and experiences just waiting for them in such a regular spot? But if you don’t live in those streets, would you ever even drive past or know about them?

I certainly wouldn’t have known to Google ‘Duck Pond’ for what we were looking for, though now I do!

We had so much fun. We found some guppies, the kids caught them in nets and watched them in a bucket for a while before we released them. We wore gumboots and clothes we didn’t mind getting dirty. We watched the birds too and listened to the insects. We looked for tadpoles but didn’t find any!

Your Turn for adventure

This is a fun activity you can do with older kids too. Get a map out (hardcopy or Google – up to you!) and let them have a look and see what’s around your area. There is an amazing walk near my home that doesn’t show up on Google searches, but you can see the green space on the map. Is there a park or playground you didn’t know about? Is there a pond or creek? Is there a walk somewhere? Is there something you can’t figure out what it could possibly be? Be curious about what things are, don’t assume you know. It can be super simple, in fact it probably will be – otherwise you’d already know about it.

Part of the fun of this adventure is discovering something in your own region that you never saw before. That unknown – what will you find?

What’s on your map? Let me know!

Using Google Maps to Find Awesome Adventure Spots Near You

Your Turn for adventure

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