Exploring Popular Travel Destinations Like Beaches And Parks From Home

One of the easiest and quickest ways to explore the world is with Google Maps. You can look at parks, beaches or where ever you want. It is also good for getting directions. I often use it to plan my bike trips. You can get a good idea of what places look like and how to get there. However it does not provide a very good view and it is not current.

The Street View shows a lot more detail. As the name suggests it is a view from the street so the images are a lot better but they are not as good as a photograph from a digital camera. Since the pictures were taken from a car you can only see what you would see if you were driving and there are a lot of roads that have not bee done yet.

Click the map and drag it to move the viewing area. To check out the Street View drag the person to a road. If the road turns blue you can drop the person there to get the street view. You may need to turn to get a view of the road that allows you to move along it. On this map you can drag the person to the Loyalist Parkway by Wellington at the left side of the map.

Webcams can provide you with a better look than google maps and the images are current. However most places do not have them and the view is not much better than the view from google maps in most cases.

If you do a search for "beach cams" you can find webcams that show different beaches but there are not very many that are worth looking at. In most cases you would be better off searching for pictures or videos.

Below you can find some of the best outdoor webcams that I found.

The internet has a ton of high quality pictures of popular places from around the world. Some of the most popular websites are picture sharing sites like Flickr, Zoomr and Photobucket. More and more people are using digital cameras or phones with built in cameras to take pictures of the places they have been and they like sharing them.

You can find pictures by going to a search engine or photos sharing site and doing a search. Before you select a picture to view see if it shows the size especially when using a search engine like Google. Some of the images are too small to provide a good view.

The pictures to the right were taken by me at Sandbanks Provincial Park. They provide you with a good idea of what the beaches look like. Both beaches are nice but Outlet Beach is often crowded. Sandbanks Beach is huge and gets less people so it is easy to walk away from the crowds.

Click the pictures for a larger view.

Video sites like YouTube are very popular now. New videos are being added all the time. Instead of just showing you a moment in time you can often experience a few minutes. Most videos are under 5 minutes. You can watch people windsurfing, see people swimming and enjoying the beach, listen to people tell you about their trip and much more.

You can get a better idea of what it would be like to be there by watching and listening to videos compared to looking at pictures. However they are usually half the size of a picture. When you go to a site like YouTube the videos are the size as the one below. Sometimes they are bigger or smaller if you download them. Most video sites show the videos at a specific size. So if I upload a video from my camera it will be shown at a smaller size than if I watched it on my computer.

If you plan on going somewhere or you just want to see the world from your home the options discussed above can give you a good idea of what the areas are like.