Maps Versus GPS

When I was growing up our family depended on maps to help us get to where we were going. I can remember as we drew close to our visit with relatives we would either follow directions that they’d given us or drive through the town searching for the correct street address, then cruising up and down that street looking at house numbers. Once when we visited my uncle Nicky and Ina Nicholson in Ohio, the directions read, “After you leave Millersport, drive about 2 miles until you top a small hill.”

We’d gone about 5 miles before Dad turned the car around and headed back toward town. When we came to a slight rise in the road, Dad decided that Ohio was so flat this was what Uncle Nicky meant by a hill. What we in Pennsylvania thought of as a road swell, he considered a hill.

One of the hardest parts of reading the paper map was trying to spread it out in the car at night and actually reading it. There was never enough light from the overhead which reflected on the inner side of the windshield and made it difficult for the driver to see the road. It was also awkward using a flashlight. Another inconvenience of using a map was trying to refold it; most of the times it never seemed to go back in the same position.

Modern technology has made most maps obsolete. Drivers today will never know the joy of driving one handedly and trying to hold the map at the same time. It was every bit as dangerous as texting on the cell phone and driving today. There are also aps on the phones that handle the functions of the Tom Tom or Garmin GPS devices. All these little gizmos are be a great asset at finding the correct address. There is less cruising to look for the street or the house number, the voice tells the driver when he or she has arrived.

For the most part this is great for urban areas, but when the driver heads out of the city and into the country, the GPS may send him or her down a muddy, potholed cow path. These off the beaten paths are more easily traversed by a four wheel drive truck or SUV. Some of them are not for the fainthearted, but there are those who are fool hearted enough to try. An example of this was the first time my computer repairman made a visit and complained about the muddy washboard road he’d driven on.

Maps versus GPS, the good, the bad, and the ugly.