Great thread, I love maps as well, ever since I was a kid and was into Orienteering, even got to make maps for a few Orienteering events.

My wife hates maps - my fault as I always give her a hard time about having to turn the map around to look at it - reading a map is a definite skill that a lot of women lack (ducks swinging handbags).

One of my favourite maps is a photocopy of a hand drawn mining map I was given by a road train driver on the road into Innamincka in Australia. It covered the area down South to Tibooburra. It showed the "roads" (sand and gravel tracks) and all the "shot line" tracks put in for the mining exploration. There was also notations about sand dunes - easy, hard, no.

Me too
 

Me too. I was lucky, 50 yers ago my scout master had been a map maker in the army, dashing about in the desert, Italy and Normandy in a scout car, so he taught us well. Trouble is you don't get a book of maps in OS detail that covers S.America, so my laptop and Garmin have to take over on the road.

The most interesting map I have seen was a stereoscopic one of a Greek island in Scientific American about 30 years ago I guess. It had green and red lines and you needed a pair of 3D glasses but it really brought the terrain alive, and the undersea terrain as well. I would think that for those to whom elevation lines are a mystery, this would have bought instant clarification.

No one seems to be against paper maps, oh and Caminando, despite all of the modern wonders strapped to my bike, I still seem to be wandering about in the dark....Signor, donde est la carreterre por favor? ....and why is the sun in the wrong part of the sky? My shadows pointing the wrong way! and who pinched Ursa Major?
I'm always amazed when I get to where I planned to be using the Garmin which is miles out sometimes, and also tells me there are roads where there are not, last week it told me to go back 79 miles, make a U turn and arrive at my destination half a mile up the road in 2 hrs!!! A paper map would reassure me loads.

I just Googled to find what the Michelin 741 covered.
Sorry but I just had to know.

Same here, even if it's just a free one from a local tourist information place, youth hostel, etc. I'm not the most experienced traveller by a long shot (never even left Europe) but I've still managed collect a few A4 folders full of the things and many will get re-used on future trips

Recently bought an OS wallmap of Europe which you can use drywipe markers on. It's not the ideal scale but can easily lose an hour just by scrawling potential routes and places to visit all over it. Kind of reassuring to know it's not just me that has a map fetish.

BTW, I do use GPS and Google Earth a lot but I'd never consider setting off without a map and compass. I take the attitude that one compliments the other.

Another fan here
 

Yep, love maps, don't know why. Over the years, I've collected many, mostly OS maps of the UK for walking. I would never throw one out and I'd never draw on one.

I love pouring over maps working out possible routes, looking for interesting features.

On the desk at the moment, I have a map of Germany for a long weekend ride to the Harz mountains and three maps of Scandinavia for a longer trip this summer. Love Stanfords in London, will happily pay full price for a map but buy my books in charity shops.

Also, being a bit of a technophobe, and a tightwad, I think I'll keep to maps rather than GPS for a while longer. I can see where GPS would help out in the desert or conversely navigating an unfamiliar city but it'll never give you the whole picture.

For route planning, looking at the surrounding area, all the different coloured roads and twisty bits, finding villages with quirky names, there's nothing like looking at a map and thinking, 'Hmm, rather than take this route, how about that one?'

Indoors

That would be a great thing to do. You could make it a little easier by studying a map before you went and memorising some of the places you would pass through. That way you could say "Excuse me, can you tell me the way to Sheffield/ London/ Dover/ Paris/ Bern/ Milan/ Ljubljana etc..." working with road signs and sticking to non motorway roads. I bet you'd see places you'd never have seen otherwise.

Matt :)

This very nicely sums up the advantage of maps over GPS!

Matt :)

I love maps. All maps. Particularly those that are printed on almost tear and waterproof paper such as a german outfit whom I can't remember their name. But maps are good. You need them. They're great to spill beer and wine on, and to get soaked in the rain. They are fun to look at in dimly lit bars in back alleys of places others will never believe you've been. Maps are life. They are beautiful. and they are your best friend.

There be dragons here
 

My love of maps is so tied to my love of exploration it's pathological. The first maps that captured my soul where the ones in national geographic magazines. They, of course, showed the most remote, exotic and far away places. How could a boy of 10 resist a map where it was printed "There be dragons here".
Maps of jungles, oceans, abondoned civilizations, the moon, Mars; they all covered my bedroom walls at some point.
For me, maps are now like a good adventure book - only one to be lived not just read. Like a new bought book, it is crisp and unmarked. As the trip takes shape, the map grows gets new folds, marks and stains. Then during the trip it reflects the wear of thumb, road and sun. By the end, it is tattered, torn, and road weary - like me. And every time I pick up that treasured map, the trip floods back.
Now, my maps show me the places I want to make sure I visit, the best road to take, and where I'll stop at night.
However, every once in a while, I look for those places that so fascinated me in younger years (officially at old-fart-stage now). Those places that are blank. The places where there are no features, no roads, and no clues.
Those are the places, after all, where, "there be dragon".

Peace, and very pleasant daydreams,

Narly

I sometimes wonder if my love of maps comes from the little ink drawn maps I often found in the hard back books about adventure that I read as a child. I'd pull down some dusty tome from my dad's bookshelf and open up the front cover and inside would be a map relating to the area in which the action happened. Often the maps would be sketches drawn by the author with annotations such as "Attacked by cannibals here." etc!

I particularly liked that these maps often represented things, rather than with symbols, with quite lifelike drawings. i.e. not contour lines, but a little drawing of a mountain, or a realistic representation of a river (complete with rapids and waterfalls) rather than a blue line.

I would always love being able to refer back to the map whilst reading the book, to see just where such and such an event happened, or how far they still had to travel to find the source of the river/hidden diamond mine/enemy encampment etc!

I have always sworn that if I ever get round to writing a book it will a have a sketch map in the front cover, complete with annotations, lines of long. and lat. and a little compass point in the bottom right hand corner!

Matt :)

its all about the map
 

Matt,

dude, its all about the map...
given the choice of a GPS or a Map I would choose the latter every time..
Not only is it no doubt out of date and get lost/broken/torn but it gives so much more of an adventure, exploring random roads and markings...

my father on the other hand, is the exact opposite, swearing by his GPS..
weird hay?
would have thoughht the younger son, grown up on technology and the internet would be the opposite...

Now then - I think that GPS is much more likely to make you explore 'random' roads. We used our GPS for the first time in Portugal, and wow, it took us to so many tiny out of the way villages that we started to look forward to the randomness of where it would take us each day.

Not that I don't love maps, but don't rule out differenet ways to use the GPS too :)

maps
 

For our trip trough Africa I bought many maps of various makes of all countries that we might possibly cross. Ended up with about 35 maps and all laminated them with sticky plastic. Took me weeks but even after intensive use on our trip they are still very good.

Every time I want to look up something, when watching Discovery or NG I take out the maps, they are always within an arm length. On the wall I have the Michelin Worldmap and look at it almost every day.

A friend of mine glued all Michelin maps of Africa together, cut the shape of Africa out along the shorelines and glued it to the wall like wall paper! Really nice! I might do that too, just need some space!

Cheers,
Noel
exploreafrica.web-log.nl

Put it on the ceiling!

I've thought about doing something similar with European maps. Like I said in my last post in this topic, I think the maps that you can use with whiteboard markers are a great idea at the rough planning stage. For this reason, I'm thinking about making a table with a glass top and maybe a large scale map of the Alps, the Black Forest or the Eifel mountains under it. May well be useful in planning routes, but If I'm honest, I'd do it just because it would look nice. I know, I'm sad.

On my GPS I start out each morning with it set to 'shortest route' and 'prefer small roads' (or something like that. Goes all sorts of odd places :) I change the settings when I need something ... like food or petrol.

GPS maps can be good too - Gramins City Nav types hide the small roads until you zoom right in.. not good in the countryside. Tracks 4 Australia, Shonky Maps, Tracks 4 Africa all look to have that set up correctly .. at least for my use (ofr course they don't cover every part of the globe, just their specific areas.).