Help creating a simple neighborhood street map with a few markups

Our neighborhood, like many across the country, is having a “Bear Hunt” for something fun to do with the little kids while they are stuck at home with all the schools, parks, and restaurants closed. The idea is that people would put teddy bears or other cute stuffed animals in their windows. The parents could then take the kiddies for a walk to see how many they could spot.

I would like to create a reasonably high resolution street map of our neighborhood including street names and block outlines of the houses. It is not necessary that it include the addresses. I would then add little teddy bears or something to mark those houses that have bears to find.

The neighborhood in question is about 1.5 miles wide and 1.0 miles high. This is too much area to print on one page and still be able to read the street names and see the bear icons. And most little kids aren’t going to walk a 1.5 sq mile area. My plan would be to cut the overall image into smaller pieces so each family could print out the map around their home.

The problem I am having is finding a map of the 1.5 x 1.0 mile area with a high enough resolution that it is still clear when I cut it up into smaller pieces. I think a usable area is about 0.5 x 0.5 miles, so I would end up cutting the master image into about 6 smaller pieces.

The other problem with I am having with Google Maps and other similar services is the Zoom granularity. One zoom setting is too big and the next one is too small. That would not be a problem is the one that was too big had the resolution of the one that is too small, as I can crop it down to size, but the larger the area, the lower the resolution.

So, after that long-winded prelude, can anyone suggest a way that I can get a map of an 1.5 x 1.0 area that has the detail and the resolution of a smaller one, like 0.5 x 0.5?

Thanks

It’s not clear whether you’re in a position to do this, but a graphic designer’s solution to that problem would be to produce a vector graphic based on a trace of the Google map. That way, resolution is no longer an issue, and it can easily be divided up into the sub-regions needed.

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If you use the + and - to zoom in google maps, it does indeed jump between zooms quite a bit. Using the scroll wheel on a mouse or pinching/stretching on a trackpad will allow for a more precise zoom.