Online Trick

Ever wished to use a trail on OSM on your GPS or smartphone? With this neat little R-Script this can easily be done. You'll just need to search OpenStreetMap for the ID of the trail (way), put this as argument to osmar::get_osm, convert to KML and you're good to go!

# get OSM data
library(osmar)
library(maptools)
  
rotewandsteig <- get_osm(way(166274005), full = T)
sp_rotewandsteig <- as_sp(rotewandsteig, what = "lines")
  
# convert to KML 
kmlLine(sp_rotewandsteig@lines[[1]], kmlfile = "rotewandsteig.kml",
        lwd = 3, col = "blue", name = "Rotewandsteig") 

# view it
shell.exec("rotewandsteig.kml")

The osmar-package enables you to retrieve all geographic elements of OpenStreetMap via its API.
I.e., you can retrieve a street, river, state-boundary or whatever and use this as a spatial object in R.

It's overwhelming thinking of the endless playground that is opened for R-users by this package!

And, owing to altruistic R-package authors (like the ones of osmar, Thomas Schlesinger and Manuel J. A. Eugster) the oligarch's (ESRI) power evermore crumbles away..