hahah.. thats a good catch.. ..google does have a sense of humor when theyreach a dead end road :)-

I was going to swim the 3,500 miles until I saw that they don't tell you where to get refreshment once in Brittain. Come on Google, after 29 days of swimming, I'm going to need some serious Gatorade

What makes them think that swimming would be better option than flying. Anyways nice catch!!

Quite why the instruction is to swim to Le Havre, not an English port is bemusing ...

You can map directions from any point in the US to any point in Europe, and it has you swimming from Boston to France

kottke just covered this as well, he went from NYC to Dublin. Again for some strange reason it goes through France and England first!

http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/03/13112.html

I guess that's the only swimming route they mapped... though it would be more logical to aim to come ashore at a point closer to your destination.

This seems to work only between North America (Canada and the US) and Europe. Sensible really. Who'd want to swim from Buenos Aires to Madrid? Who'd dare to swim from Cape Town to Sydney?

I can see the lawsuit and headlines coming already...

Someone WILL take this literally!

Jack, Alan and Dan, Its quicker to swim to France, Duh! Water is calmer there too.

(sarcasm rocks!)

hasnt this been this way since Google Maps added Europe?

It should sugget you to wear the life water jacket....

Obviously the Maps team wanted it to be discovered in 3 days, but they underestimated us. ;-]

"Family sues Google after fatal attempt at trans-atlantic swim"

<<hasn't this been this way since Google Maps added Europe>>

No, Previously GMaps said it couldn't find a route between the places specified.

Could you even swim that far in one go? You'd be warn out!

It's Google's other way of saying "Don't go there" :)

Google used this funny google maps result themselves during their Google GeoDay in Amsterdam (NL). For more see www.nederkaart.nl

Nice Joke. Nonetheless it has some other issues in really direction serching. Why it is not possible in Google Maps to search for a direction
from: Munich, Germany to: Zagreb, Croatia
?
Both locations for themselfs are found standalone. But other inter-country directions work like:
from: Munich, Germany to: Wien, Austria

Other Routing-services can handle such queries. If you want take a try at http://www.adac.de . This is the biggest german automobile club. I think Google should enable this.

greetings, Thomas

The problem is probably that Croatia still hasn't much road data in Google Maps. If they rely on our government to provide that data, it's obvious they'll wait for a long time... :-[