Good point. When I was working on this code before posting it to PM, I had changed the Soap::Lite call to include its trace functionality as follows:

use SOAP::Lite +trace;

In order to get that to work, I had to comment out the "use strict;" line. Doing the above showed me that I had miskeyed my Google API key. I fixed that and then removed the "+trace" from the Soap::Lite call. I've updated the code to include a line to flag failure in the Soap::Lite call along the lines of your suggestion.