Dear Jerry: How Can I Find a Good Swimming Hole?
Advice columnist Jerry Grimes on how to stay cool in this heat
Dear Jerry is an advice column by Jerry Grimes. Readers can submit questions about materials, fabrication techniques, professional etiquette, lover’s quarrels, getting into grad school, whatever.
Q: Dear Jerry,
How can I find a good swimming hole near Kansas City, Missouri?
Signed,
Wanting to Get Wet
Dear WtGW,
This is a great question and it arrived at an excellent time. It’s looking to be one of the hottest summers on record, so a good swimming spot is gonna be necessary.
Seeing as I have only been through KCMO a handful of times—and if I’m gonna be on water, I prefer the solid deck of a pontoon boat under my feet—I am going to expand on this question a bit to include other people’s answers and other people’s places.
I have been working with a few editors and our super tech support department to come up with my answer in the form of a crowd-sourced map. That way we can start logging good swimming spots in KC and everywhere else, too.
If you know of a good spot and don’t see it on the map—great! Add it! That’s what makes it crowd-sourced, after all. I have a few directions on how to use it below because even though Google can power a self-driving car, they can’t figure out how to let you drop a pin in the app.
If you wanna add a swimming spot here’s the play by play…
1. Open the link here.
You gotta open the map on a browser, not on the app.
2. Find the pin icon that says “Add Marker” and click on that.
3. Your cursor will become a crosshair. Set the crosshair on your swimming spot and click. A new box will show up: one text box will say (point #), and you can change it to the name you’d like. The text box below is where you can add a description of the spot–anything you think people should know about the spot like: what kind of crowd goes there, what the landscape is like, landmarks if it’s hard to find, things like that.
And that’s it!
Let’s all pass this map around
(here’s that link again so you can copy paste it:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1SgUqILCnkcs-r9rBW35dZ3zA59fMLvk&ll=38.663849442322956%2C-94.91823456601841&z=13)
Send it to a friend so we can populate more swimming spots in more places. Maybe while you’re out there cooling off, you’ll run into a fellow reader IRL.
Stay cool this summer!
Jerry
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