I’m wondering if anyone has found out anything shocking, surprising, or the answer to a decades-old mystery (what IS behind that 10-foot brick wall, anyway?) via google earth.
I did, sort-of. There was an urban legend on my elementary school playground that the pond outside the Illinois Department of Transportation is shaped like Illinois. When driving by it on the highway, you can see that it isn’t, but you can’t really tell how much unlike Illinois it is shaped. Seeing it from google earth, however, I can see that, well, it’s just a pond.
There was a house in my old neighborhood that had three non-functioning cars in the front yard. Two of them had no wheels and sat on blocks. The third had four flat tires. We speculated that privacy fence around the back was concealing their own personal junkyard.
That reminds me: I found out that the beautiful cherry trees at the house I grew up in have been removed. And that my elementary and high school have had even more sections added to them.
I found that much as I suspected, the long walk I had to make every day to/from school (uphill both ways, in the snow, etc. etc.) could have been cut by 90% if I could have cut through 2 back yards.
After hurricane Katrina, I google Earthed our prior quicklime supplier in New Orleans, and discovered that they were no longer an option as supplier. Their lime kiln had been on the other side of the levee. And there it still sat, half-submerged in the receeding waters.
This will make me seem stalker-ish, but I found Kate Bush’s home on Google Earth. I wasn’t looking for it, hadn’t bothered and have no plans to ever try to visit there. But there was a news report about how a 250 year old weir at one end of her property failed and the canal the weir was protecting was now unnavigable and how a “narrowboat” was now stuck. So I was curious about what the heck a “narrowboat” was and how a weir differed from a dam. So I started looking around the area indicated and found a house that exactly matched the geographic location and - more importantly - matched the house in a picture in the liner notes of her recent album “Aerial”.
The “mystery” in this case is why writers continue to insist that she “lives on an island in the Thames”. It’s not an island and it’s not in the Thames. I don’t know what the exact definition of “island” is, but I suspect it excludes pieces of land with a small stream on either side that a man could wade across.
My cousin bought a new house in Texas and had just forwarded me his new home address.
I google-earthed it and next time I talked to him (even though I’m up in Minnesota) I asked him about his neighbors pool, a tree in the front yard, the nice concrete driveway, the nearby park that he could get to by following a small path through the neighborhood, etc.
He was pretty mystified at the details I knew about his new home till I told him about google-earth.