Flashback Friday

I'm a proud owner of yet another piece of technological genious - I now own a GPS. I bought just this evening, and after playing with it for only fifteen minutes, I'm in love with it. I can't wait to go somewhere tomorrow with the family so we can officially try it out and see if it works. I know, I know; I'm sure it will work, but I just want to prove to myself that it works. As I was driving home from the store tonight, I started thinking about what we did for directions before the GPS and Mapquest -- we used old school folding maps.

I was born in a family of travellers, and at an early age, my father taught me how to read a map. It's not always that easy when you're in a car moving at a pretty fast pace, but I was able to read it fairly accurately and relay the information to the driver, usually him. But more importantly, I was also able to fold the map back to its original form. That skill was harder to master than reading the map itself. Mom is a great map reader and map folder, too. She's actually had more experience at it than I have.

Up until just a few years ago, we always had a fold-out map of Louisville and one of Kentucky in the house. Until Mapquest came along, I remember getting the Louisville map and spreading it out on the kitchen table and figuring out a route I wanted to take to get to where I was going. Many a time I relied on the fold-out maps to get me around Cincinnati or Nashville on weekend trips. Now, people have printed directions from Mapquest to use because they don't want to take the time to read a real map. How sad for them.