Planning your trip
Flipping through printed travel guides and printable street maps is passé. Tech tools are far more efficient at keeping your plans organized and easily accessible. As a frequent traveler, I always turn to a few time savers: building your own travel maps, using an itinerary management app and keeping important travel notes in a digital spreadsheet.
Various materials related to South Carolina geology are available for a nominal fee to cover printing and shipping cost from the Geological Survey at DNR. Topics include SC minerals and rocks, geologic maps, Geologic Quadrangle Maps, Open-File Maps and reports, Field Trip Guidebooks, mineral resources series, and other related topics.
South Carolina Flood Maps SC Flood Mitigation Map
The South Carolina Flood Mitigation Program at DNR provides access to floodplain maps produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). A complete set of reference maps for South Carolina is available and staff are available to answer questions and provide assistance to map users.
Printable Maps
Downloadable printable maps below are in Adobe PDF format.
South Carolina 7.5-Minute Topographic Maps Index
South Carolina 7.5-Minute Topographic Maps Index
The following index shows the boundary for USGS 7.5-minute (1:24,000 scale) Topographic quadrangles for South Carolina. The map includes the name of the quadrangle with some basic reference data.
Map size: 22 x 17 inches (1,584 x 1,224 pt)
File size: 3.9 MB
Here’s a map of Mexico’s five states the U.S. deemed most dangerous, as well as the general warnings across the rest of the country. The State Department gave Mexico a level 2 travel warning overall, encouraging travelers to exercise increased caution in general.
Why fumble around with a printed map when you can tailor a digital one just for your trip? (Even in areas with spotty cell service, you can still make use of digital maps so long as you download offline maps ahead of time.) The My Maps web app from travel maps has been my most powerful travel planning tool for years.
Using the street map creator on a computer browser, you can look up points of interest like museums, restaurants and hotels and pin them on a map. To make the pins easy to read, you can color-code them or mark them with symbols — like an icon of a spoon and a knife for restaurants, or an icon of a bed for hotels. You can add notes to each point of interest, like a few words about the type of food served at a restaurant. You can also create “layers” to help organize your trip — for example, I create a new layer for each day of the trip. After making your custom map, you can call it up via the travel city maps app on a smartphone, in a menu labeled Your places.
The main benefit of this exercise is that the visual context of a map can help you plan each day around the proximity of points of interest. For example: When planning a trip to Taiwan this year, I created a layer for Day 1 and pinned a museum in northern Taipei along with some restaurants and a fish market in the area. After visiting the museum, I tapped on the nearest pin and loaded directions to walk to it. Using this routine, I visited nearly everything I wanted to see on the 10-day trip.
In the bad old days when I went on trips without custom maps, I jotted down a list of places I wanted to visit. Each day, I wasted far too much time, phone battery and cellular data figuring out which landmark to visit, how to get there and what to do afterward.
There’s another way custom maps save time. When your friends are visiting a country you have traveled to and bug you for your “bucket list” recommendations, you can simply send a street map invitation to the friend to view your map. That is far more useful than sharing a list of places to go.
Various materials related to South Carolina geology are available for a nominal fee to cover printing and shipping cost from the Geological Survey at DNR. Topics include SC minerals and rocks, geologic maps, Geologic Quadrangle Maps, Open-File Maps and reports, Field Trip Guidebooks, mineral resources series, and other related topics.
South Carolina Flood Maps SC Flood Mitigation Map
The South Carolina Flood Mitigation Program at DNR provides access to floodplain maps produced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). A complete set of reference maps for South Carolina is available and staff are available to answer questions and provide assistance to map users.
Printable Maps
Downloadable printable maps below are in Adobe PDF format.
South Carolina 7.5-Minute Topographic Maps Index
South Carolina 7.5-Minute Topographic Maps Index
The following index shows the boundary for USGS 7.5-minute (1:24,000 scale) Topographic quadrangles for South Carolina. The map includes the name of the quadrangle with some basic reference data.
Map size: 22 x 17 inches (1,584 x 1,224 pt)
File size: 3.9 MB
Here’s a map of Mexico’s five states the U.S. deemed most dangerous, as well as the general warnings across the rest of the country. The State Department gave Mexico a level 2 travel warning overall, encouraging travelers to exercise increased caution in general.
Why fumble around with a printed map when you can tailor a digital one just for your trip? (Even in areas with spotty cell service, you can still make use of digital maps so long as you download offline maps ahead of time.) The My Maps web app from travel maps has been my most powerful travel planning tool for years.
Using the street map creator on a computer browser, you can look up points of interest like museums, restaurants and hotels and pin them on a map. To make the pins easy to read, you can color-code them or mark them with symbols — like an icon of a spoon and a knife for restaurants, or an icon of a bed for hotels. You can add notes to each point of interest, like a few words about the type of food served at a restaurant. You can also create “layers” to help organize your trip — for example, I create a new layer for each day of the trip. After making your custom map, you can call it up via the travel city maps app on a smartphone, in a menu labeled Your places.
The main benefit of this exercise is that the visual context of a map can help you plan each day around the proximity of points of interest. For example: When planning a trip to Taiwan this year, I created a layer for Day 1 and pinned a museum in northern Taipei along with some restaurants and a fish market in the area. After visiting the museum, I tapped on the nearest pin and loaded directions to walk to it. Using this routine, I visited nearly everything I wanted to see on the 10-day trip.
In the bad old days when I went on trips without custom maps, I jotted down a list of places I wanted to visit. Each day, I wasted far too much time, phone battery and cellular data figuring out which landmark to visit, how to get there and what to do afterward.
There’s another way custom maps save time. When your friends are visiting a country you have traveled to and bug you for your “bucket list” recommendations, you can simply send a street map invitation to the friend to view your map. That is far more useful than sharing a list of places to go.
