Places Near Me

📍 Start With Your Location

The map opens on your current position (the browser asks permission the first time) and drops a blue pin there. The line under 📍 Use My Location tells you exactly which spot every distance is measured from — tap the button any time to re-center.

Not where you're going to be? Open Start Somewhere Else, type a town or address and press Search From Here — every distance and route then measures from there instead. That box and the End box below it are the two ends of one line: start, then destination.

🔍 Search vs. Categories

Pick a category (gas, food, lodging…) for green pins — one at a time. With a category picked, typing in the search box narrows those pins as you type: it costs nothing and needs no second Search. With no category picked, the same box searches by name for red pins, and Name Must Match keeps only places whose name contains what you typed — uncheck it to also see the related places Google suggests.

🛣️ The Two Distances

Radius is how far off your path you'll detour. Distance Along Route is how far ahead to keep looking. Driving Florida to Michigan? Set Distance Along Route to 200 and Radius to 10, and you get everything in the next 200 miles that's never more than a 10-mile detour. Check Search Entire Route and enter a destination to use them.

Use Google Routes and Avoid Tolls are for trusted members only — everyone else's route comes from the free engine, which can't avoid tolls or offer alternates.

Once you've pressed 🧭 Get Route, that drive comes back on the map by itself next time you open the page — same destination, same route, nothing to re-type. It's the same one My Places uses, so a route you set up on either page is already drawn on the other. Only a route you actually asked for is remembered — typing in the box isn't enough — and ✕ Clear Route forgets it. Nothing else here is searched on its own; categories and Search Entire Route still wait for you to press Search.

You may see a second purple line you didn't ask for: that's your trip — where you start, each stop along the way, then your destination — drawn automatically so you can tell whether a place you're looking at is anywhere near it. The caption under the map's color key names the trip. It isn't a set of directions and ✕ Clear Route doesn't touch it; change it on Edit Trip.

Blue pins with a name beside them are your trip's plans — what you've scheduled on the Itinerary page — so you can see whether what's near you is near what you've already booked. Tap one to open it.

A pin marked ≈ sits at the center of its town, not at a street address. Trip stops and plans are placed from their city and state, so the pin can be several miles from the door — link a plan to a park or a campsite to pin it exactly. Search results and your own saved places are never approximate.

Open 🔑 Map key under the map for what every pin, number and color means. Note that two purple lines can appear here: the 🧭 Route you asked for on this page, and your trip's route. The labels on the trip's line name your stops.

When the trip has both route stops and itinerary plans, only one of them is numbered — pick which under Numbers on the map, and the choice follows you to the other trip maps.

🕐 Open Until & API Calls

Open Until keeps only places still open at the time you pick (or Open Now), judged in each place's own timezone. Places with no posted hours stay on the map — unknown isn't closed.

Open Until is the one filter with a price: opening hours are a premium Google field, so a search with it set costs five times as much and is cached for six hours instead of a week. Leave it on Any to stay cheap.

The API call counter shows what your searching has cost; repeating a search adds nothing, because results are cached. Clicking a pin fetches its rating, phone, website and hours — one premium call, cached for 20 minutes. Find Everything In The Radius multiplies a search by the number of circles it takes, and Use Google Drive Times bills one call per pin on every search — both are off by default for a reason. Any search estimated at 30 calls or more stops and names the figure before it runs.

This site stops itself at 500 searches and 150 detail lookups a day, well under Google's free allowance; the 💰 What Each Option Costs card under the results has the full price list.

🏕️ Our Own Catalog

Three picks aren't Google's. Campgrounds and Hiking Trails mix our own rows in alongside Google's, because the two sources are good at opposite things — you get the commercial site Google lists and the free dispersed one with no listing anywhere. The three Parks picks are ours alone.

Our rows are free and uncapped, so for those picks — unlike a Google search — a wider Radius really does keep finding more. Where we hold no trailhead point for a trail, its pin sits at the park's center and says so, rather than claiming a precision it doesn't have.

Because they're ours, they have pages here. A park, trail or camp-site row carries a details link — and parks and trails also carry ★ Rate, which drops you straight onto that page's rating card. Both are on the pin's popup and on its row in the list below.

And if this site's Google allowance runs out, those three keep working — so do the route, drive times, and searching from a place you type in. Only Google's own listings, ratings and opening hours pause until it resets.

📋 The Results List

Every search also fills a list under the map. Sort it by distance, name or category, or type in its filter box to narrow it — all of which is free, because it only re-arranges results you already paid for. Tap any row to fly to that pin. Prefer this to re-running a search with different settings.

Rows from our own catalog — parks, trails and camp sites — carry their own links underneath: details for the full page, and ★ Rate on parks and trails.

Signed in, every row and pin popup carries Hide: that place stays out of all your future searches here, whether it's a Google listing, a park, a camp site or a trail. 🙈 Manage Hidden Places, under the list, is where you bring one back.