Daily Cascade

On Maps and Such...

Prompt: Maps
With all the latest technological advances, maps are becoming something of the past, since we have other types of navigational tools in our cars. With that in mind, do you still use a map, and do you think maps can still be of use to us?

------------

I don't think maps are totally disappearing. Just maybe, they are evolving like everything else. As to being navigational tools, they don't offer us just directions but a way of seeing the world in relation to where we are.

Then, there are such things as navigational and interactive maps that are designed for hiking trails, for directions to landmarks, for the possible use of food trucks, and for the use of other vehicles that may be used to move people with the contents of their homes from one city to another. These save time and adjust to detours or traffic in real time. This is important because the old kinds of folded paper maps couldn't tell us anything about real time, could they!

Plus, GPS has narrowed my vision to my immediate route, also. On the other hand, lost to me are the romance of the road-trip maps and atlases, the instant locating of a broader area, how cities connect or rivers bend, and how elevation changes. I recall, way back when, how important that road-trip map was before my husband and I set upon a driving trip.

So now, in hindsight, just maybe, the maps are still there, but in the background. This is because maps are hidden inside the apps, websites, and services we so depend on. I think. now, they are also in the mind of the GPS in my car, not that I have used the GPS in years.

Yet, I still look at some real maps to see Europe, South America, and the rest of the world at one glance, just to remember, maybe, once upon a time, that traveling bug which had gotten under my skin.

While writing this entry, I also recalled those large three-dimensional globes that most of us had inside our homes as if they were a part of us. My sons, when they were little, loved to make ours turn fast and make the whole globe seem to flow into a single blur...as if the entire earth became fluid and we all belonged to the same world.