While out driving the rural highways of South Carolina you may have come across a road sign with this symbol…
Seeing a road sign like this lets you know that you are on either the South Carolina Discovery Route, or the South Carolina Nature Route, both parts of the South Carolina Heritage Corridor.
On the way back from Charleston Laura and I often get off the interstate and take the country roads home. We have specifically looked for these signs, and once followed the the Nature Route as far as we could.
According to the SC Heritage Corridor website…
The South Carolina National Heritage Corridor extends 240 miles across South Carolina, stretching from the mountains of Oconee County, along the Savannah River, to the port city of Charleston…The South Carolina National Heritage Corridor was established by the U.S. Congress in 1996 as one of a select number of National Heritage Areas…
The Heritage Corridor has an excellent website with links to resources around the state. In particular I like the interactive maps using Google Maps. However, there’s a problem. You can’t really do anything with the maps other than follow the links to resources. What I wanted to do was download the data into a KML file for Google Earth, or, better yet, a GPX file that I could dump into my GPS. I e-mailed the webmaster to see if a KML file was available, but never got a response. So, I took matters into my own hand.
By viewing the page source of the map pages on their website I saw that the data points were hard coded into the webpages (or, more likely, imported from a database via some script). Simply by copying and pasting the page source into a text file I had the data, but it wasn’t yet in a useable format.
I won’t explain the entire process, but I used a combination of MS-Access, various queries, etc., etc., to strip away the excess coding until I had latitude, longitude, and location name. I was able to create a comma-delimited file from this data. Using GPSBabel I was able to convert this into both KML and GPX formats. Problem solved, and now I can (and will) dump all of the Heritage Corridor locations into my GPS so that I can either navigate to them directly, or see them pop on the map as I get close enough.
Even more than that, I’m willing to share. Here are both files, which I uploaded to my wiki site…
- South Carolina Heritage Corridor locations for Google Earth
- South Carolina Heritage Corridor locations for GPS
Enjoy!
Thanks. I grabbed both files.
We just spent some time on the Discovery Route today while out geocaching near Blackville. There were caches in two of the locations listed on the route, the Barnwell State Park and Healing Springs. Actually there is a cache inside the Discovery Center near there, but the place is closed on Sundays, so we couldn’t “find” it.
Thanks for the data. You Rock!