Mapping the Family Vacation

So it's finally here. The annual family road trip. Bags packed....check! Kids buckled in the car....check! Rand McNally's Road Atlas in the hands of the front seat passenger.....you know, the big one with each state, complete with detailed interstate and highway routes, all pertinent pages dog-eared and the complete vacation route highlighted with each planned stop along the way circled.....check! Whoaaaa....wait...what decade is this?

Yes, that's how we found our way around the country when mom and dad piled us in the family wagon for next summer adventure. I don't think there was a family in our county that didn't have at least one copy of the newest Rand McNally Road Atlas in their car.

Knowing how to read and navigate these maps was such a way of life when I was growing up in the 1960's and 1970's that we studied mapping in school. In fact, I recall the Iowa Basic Skills Tests as devoting an entire section to testing our map reading skills! We had to be able to locate areas on the map, compute distances between to given points using the scale from the corner of the page, and identify the difference between highways, county roads and undeveloped roads.

Today is another story. There are several options available to help us get from here to there. Web based services such as MapQuest or Rand McNally now allow you to input your starting point and destination point, as well as any stops you'd like to make along the way, and within a few moments a fully detailed driving route complete with mileage and estimated driving times is available to print out and take with you.

Another, and most popular mode of destination location is the GPS. What a miracle! Not only does it find where you want to go and map out how to get there, it SPEAKS to you and is not shy to tell you when you blew it and need to TURN AROUND....or "make a U-turn as soon as possible"! It's just like having my mother in the passenger seat with the atlas in her lap!

I loved my family road trips.....even with sisters squished so close in the back seat that we repeatedly informed our parents "she's touching me" over and over and over! I loved it when mom would pass the atlas back and we worked to try to determine exactly where on which highway we were, or calculated how much longer we'd be in the car until our next stop by using the distance scale from the corner of the page. But I now know my parents loved it even more when our heads were buried in the atlas!

Stop by again sometime!
~~Teresa~~