I’m visiting with American friends who are staying in a rural farmhouse in France’s Dordogne valley. The house, which might be several hundred years old, provides faster internet access than my fiberoptic setup at home. The cars we are piloting along these ancient byways have touchscreens that control Bluetooth and satellite connections. It feels like the perfect juxtaposition of the old and the new. But the illusion cracked yesterday when we headed out to visit the medieval town of Sarlat-la-Canéda. I punched “Sarlat” into the satnav and off we went, choosing the slowest but most scenic of the offered routes. As we approached the destination my friend said: “Something is wrong, Sarlat is small but it’s not this small.” You can probably guess what happened. The maps app had found a tiny hamlet 50 miles to the north instead of the populous town 30 miles to the west. Although I know better I fell for the illusion: I’m on vacation, let the machine take care of the details, we’ll just enjoy the view. Oops.
It wasn’t really a problem. We had plenty of time, we’ve been taking back roads in order to see the countryside, we just ended up seeing more and different countryside than planned. But unlike the last time I toured France, almost 25 years ago when connected phones and map apps weren’t yet a thing, I didn’t have a conventional map and neither did my friends. Had I looked at one we would never have made this error. The map on your phone isn’t really a map, it’s a tiny viewport that can see the whole planet at any resolution but never provides the context your brain needs to reason about spatial relationships. It’ll get you from point A to point B but struggles to convey where B is in relation to C.
I’m not blaming the tech, it is a miracle I will never take for granted. The fault is entirely mine for not having a real map, spreading it out on the kitchen table before we left, enjoying a beautiful and information-dense work of cartographic art, and planning the trip with the big picture in view. That would have been another nice juxtaposition of old and new. On my next GPS-guided trip to town I’ll pick up a real map: another miracle I should never take for granted.
Update: Look what we found in a drawer. Made by Institut Géographique National in 1972.
I reckon you’d need a 16K x 12K screen to view it at print resolution.
I find it sufficient to look at Google Maps on a nice 27″ monitor before embarking on my travels, but we often put paper maps in the car “just in case”. If your car for some reason can’t provide the GPS service, the paper map will still be “online”
I love navigating by maps and map sensing. The thing we do with GPS and map apps is giving it full faith because it is technology, that we just trust fully what it spits out.
But it also separates us from the experience of matching our senses to the representation of land.
There is an interesting flip that I rarely see done. We reach for GPS maps for navigating unfamiliar places, ones we have no experience in.
I remember when I lived in Arizona doing the opposite, I turned on (old tech) Garmin dash GPS to give directions in places I lived and knew well. It was eye opening to see how it gave directions you knew were not the best, missing shortcuts or routes that were maybe longer on the map but faster because you knew it cut sections that only street sense would inform.
Enjoy the French landscapes!
Yep: paper and real people. The paper will last; the people will care.
One of the many reasons I love my iPad more than my phone… It is at least a decent-sized viewport.