Give the GPS a rest for a while

When we began taking our roadtrips back in the stoneage (2003), there was barely such a thing as GPS, no Waze, and no smartphones.  If we were going to an unfamiliar location, I would often logon to Mapquest before leaving the house and dutifully follow the instructions.  I also bought a mapbook that had one or two pages for every state in the union (plus Canadian provinces and Mexican states), along with close-up looks at the major cities in each state.  Often, whichever one of us was not driving would look through the mapbook, noting the names of interesting cities or scouting out possible attractions (denoted in red) that we might consider stopping at.

A decade and a half later, our mapbook is dog-eared and has pages that are held in by willpower alone.  Our family has five smartphones and thus can be using both Waze and Google Maps at the same time, selecting from various voice options and alerting other drives to impending traffic and lurking policemen.  You would think that our mapbook would relegated to either the garbage or at least the back of a closet somewhere.

You would not be more wrong.

True, for directions we make use of the various GPS options that are available,  but, then again, we rarely used the mapbook for specific directions - it does not have enough detail beyond the major highways.  However, our mapbook has several advantages over Waze and Google Maps.

1) It allows us to look at the big picture.  We can see where we are and what is around us in all directions.

2) Related to that, it highlights attractions that we would never think to look for.  Sure, if I were going to Indianapolis I could use TripAdvisor to discover the top 50 attractions in and around the city.  But I never would have thought to stop in Riverside, Iowa while driving from Saint Louis to Minneapolis if I had not seen the most curious notation on the map - "Future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk".

3) We have taken notes over the years.  Waze can tell you where there is a bathroom.  It cannot tell you if that bathroom is clean, or how good the vending machines are in a given pitstop.  We have made notes of such things over the years, and we have often returned to stops that we know fit our needs at the moment.  And, yes, I will be sharing some of those stops in future posts.

To put it in more concise terms, Waze thinks like a navigator, looking for the quickest route between two given points.  Our mapbook allows us to think like explorers, always seeking new adventures (and clean bathrooms), even if they take us a little far afield.