Ocean Beach Park

This past weekend me, my wife and some friends checked out Ocean Beach Park in Waterford, CT. It's a lovely spot to visit and we really enjoyed the boardwalk. Beautiful scenery from the beach as well!

Pirelli Building | West Haven, CT

My wife finally convinced me to join her at the IKEA store in New Haven, Connecticut. While I'll admit that some of the furniture there was fairly unique, I was more impressed with the design of this adjacent building.

Bluff Point State Park

After six months of living apart, my wife recently joined me here in Connecticut and we've already begun checking out what the greater New London area has to offer. This past weekend we decided to check out Bluff Point State Park as it's one of the few public beaches that doesn't charge an obscene price to park (it's free!). What we discovered is that it's no ordinary beach where you park and you're on sand after walking a few meters. It's actually a hiking and jogging trail, and you have to walk about half a mile before you get to the actual beach area. We ended up walking the entire loop, which according to rough estimates is about 3.6 miles. I took some photos as it was a beautiful day, despite being somewhat cold out (~40 plus wind chill).   Overall, it's a very nice trail to run, walk, or bike on and the trail is mostly even (no major ruts). There were no extremely steep grades. If I had to guess I'd say the steepest grade was about 8 degrees. Here's some highlights:

Beach - Harkness Memorial State Park

#beach #nature #ocean #ct #Connecticut #statepark #harknessmemorial #goshenpoint #goshencove

A photo posted by Jordan (@whiskeycoffee_) on Apr 6, 2015 at 1:15pm PDT

The other day my wife and I went exploring at some various state parks here in the Groton area - we were at Harkness Memorial State Park when we stumbled upon this beautiful public beach. Finding these hidden gems is one of the best things you can do in your free / off time!

Panoramio vs Google Maps Views

I just tried to start a discussion on the Google Maps Views community page:

So now that Google Maps / Views is displaying your public geotagged photos, it begs the question - what purpose does +Panoramio serve? Both services include your photos in Google Maps so what happens if you upload the same photo on Panoramio and Google Maps? Which photo does Google show?

AAHHH these are the questions that infuriate me. Why does Google have to have so many duplicate and/or overlapping services?

Note: I've tried posting this same question in many different arenas and have gotten no help whatsoever. Here are the links to those threads:

Panoramio Support Forum
Google Maps Support Forums
Google Maps Views Community
Google+ Support Community

I've even tweeted some of the developers behind Panoramio and Google Maps and have not gotten a reply from any of them.