Option to show/hide Map in sidebar, not with Javascript

Hello!

I’m currently creating a website for my planned sailing trip, and to show the visitor my current location+recent GPS Track I created a small new plugin/widget that shows my track+position in a small google earth map in the sidebar. Since the number trackpoints might get really high, I want to add an option to allow the visitor to hide the map and show it again if necessary.
My trackpoints are stored in a database and google API uses Javascript to draw them on the map, and I want already my php code to avoid loading those points if the map is not displayed, so just hide it per javascript is not an option. I need something like a GET or POST like &showmap=1 which tells my plugin php code if it should read the track database or not and establish the connection to the google map servers or not.

Is there a way to do that in wordpress without creating too much effort? Or does anyone of you have a different idea how to accomplish my goal?

thanks and best regards,
Mischa