Hi Kevin,
I can't recommend any type of technical equipment for this, but if you check out this website, you can measure your distance:
http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/I am not sure how computer literate you are, so here is a bit of an explanation.
It comes up showing the states and Canada. What you have to do is use the sliding scale to zoom in on an area. So first, what I do, is double click on the Trenton area (if you hover over the word Peterborough and double click that should work) to centre it to that area and then gradually zoom in on it. Zoom in to as close as you can or at the least the second from the closest in order to get the best accuracy. Then you click on the square that says "start recording" and double click on the map on your starting point. If you mess up, you can hit the "Undo last Point" button. It will tell you the distance in miles or kms - you can toggle back and forth. When you are done, you can zoom out a bit so you can see the whole route and hit the line that says "Save Route" and it gives it a number. You can save this as a favourite, if you want to keep it.
The neat thing is, you can go back and forth (in the right hand corner of the map) between "map" "satellite" or "hybrid". Unfortunately, our satellite image in this area doesn't go in too far so it isn't too clear. But I can zoom in to the street where we used to live in North Bay and see the backyard. And if you zoom in over Toronto, you can actually zoom in and see the shadow of the CN tower, the roof of the Skydome, etc. Really neat.
I use this to figure out the distance of a lot of routes, either before I go out or afterwards to see how far I went. It is a lot of fun. And it doesn't cost anything!
