Thank you, Jazbee.
In between watching a mind boggling programme on the BBC about neutrinos, I have mucked about with a route between Calais and Chimay, created in Google Maps on my Mac and imported it into BaseCamp, again on my Mac. The track imported perfectly into BaseCamp, including the one via point I had created in the Google Map version. I then asked BaseCamp to convert the track into a route, which again it did perfectly but (maybe not surprisingly) it did not bring the via point across with it. Had this been a point I had wanted to be alerted to, I would have missed it whilst hooning along. There again, it would be easy to add it into the route version manually.
As I have imported the detailed Garmin maps into BaseCamp on my Mac, I don’t have to connect my Garmin device.
I need to do some more work on understanding lots of the finer points of route creation in Google Maps. Where I think it might be quite useful is:
A. I could use Google’s powerful search engine to find places.
B. It will probably make it easier to share a route with bods who don’t use a regular GPS device but do use their phones. What I am thinking about here is when six or seven cars all drive across country from Calais to Spa, which I create our route for. At least now we should all be looking at the same hymn sheet, even is not quite singing the same song.
C. I can easily list and print out the Google Map’s turn-by-turn directions, to give to the chimps in car three of the seven, who do not even know what a phone is but do have a 1990’s map.
As with most things, the Google Map tool is quite simple (I just don’t know my way around it yet) but also very powerful. I think I have only scratched the surface; thank you Jazbee for sparking my interest in it. If I go more into a phone based method of GPS navigation, using the Connected app, it might lead me to more use of Google maps as an alternative on my phone, too.