So, when I see or hear about a cool place I want to check out, I open my map app, locate it, and save it to a list I've built. Google lets you create lists in your maps, save locations to them, and move locations between lists. For example, this is a map where I've made three of my Chicago lists visible: the blue dots are stores, landmarks, etc that I'm interested in, basically anything but food. The hamburgers are restaurants in specific, and even more specifically, the pizza slices are pizza places I want to try (pizza gets treated a little differently because not everywhere will just sell you a slice so often they're excluded from consideration if I'm just looking for a lunch spot).
So say I want to head over to Logan Square, I could make up a list specifically for Logan and move pinned places in the area into it. This is especially helpful when traveling because I can make a list of stuff I'm seeing on the current trip and exclude stuff I'd like to see but won't be able to for one reason or another. Like I have a "Europe" map, but I have a more specific map for the trip I'm taking in December, and one for places I've been but would like to revisit sometime.
But the problem is that because I'm what you could call a casual power user, I have uncovered every dumb bug in the platform. And the dumbest is that at some point, a location simply won't be unpinned. You can remove it from a list and it'll just snap back into the map as soon as you look away. I don't know if it happens once the map has too many pins or if I have too many maps or what, but it results in stuff like a yoga gym eternally existing in my To Try list, or accidentally pinning a burger joint in Aurora to my Chicago restaurant map and now the Spartan Ale House in Aurora just exists alongside like fifty eateries in Chicago. At least it's not a pizza joint.
There are a couple of fixes (believe me, if you see it in a search result, I've tried it) but none seem permanent so far. Which means that for my next trip I may need to sit down with my maps open on my laptop, rebuild a map that won't be edited on my phone, and then delete the original.
Still, it's incredibly useful for keeping track of stuff to see and do, and it helps a lot when finding cool shit to see in a strange city.
