Ok. Thx for your reply, marto, and several others who have pointed the way forward with better code. It will take me some time before I can incorporate the suggestions and have a different source for elevations than google, as well as avoiding having to going at it numerically by constraining hunting and pecking.

..., so get better data and...

Do you mean an instance of a HTTP::Request object as in:

 my $req = HTTP::Request->new(
[download]

I would still think that The Google would still know it's my IP address doing the asking. (?)

Cheers,

'Host your own', the second item on the linked page describes hosting your own instance of Open-Elevation and how to acquire the dataset you want. That way nobody can see what queries you're making.