explore - day three: Maps

We love maps, we have  a bagful and a small suitcase full. The bag is an old haversack that belonged to my dad, actually the suitcase of maps was his too, and the selection of maps is quite wide spread.
OH, OH I have just remembered that the map widget you can see on my blog is because they have a photograph of mine on there. I took a photograph of Warkworth Castle. We were sitting in the car waiting for the castle to open and I took a picture. I uploaded the holiday pics to my Flickr account and the map people saw it and asked permission to use it.
We go to lots of places that are shut. It seems to be a habit with us. We went to Jodrell Bank and it was shut, the Merchant's house in Tenby was shut. We even went to Bannockburn and it was shut and that is a field with a statue in it! But the best place we ever went was when the Vatican Library first went online. We were new to the internets then so we thought we would go and have a look. We clicked the button and waited (being on dial-up and using windows 3.11 it was slow) eventually the page opened and told us "We are sorry the Vatican Library Online is closed for refurbishment of the site".
I'll be back with more later.

Well I am back. I haven't done much with the maps except stick a few choice bits in my playbook and cut out some circles (I wonder what they could be for.... Hmmm). I am the map reader. Mr M can look at a map and have it in his head. There was a game for the computer called Dungeonmaster that required your character to walk along passages and fight monsters. Sometimes the monsters chased you and Mr M could make his character run backwards while throwing things at the monster and he knew which way to jump at all times. I need the map. I need it in front of me. Having said that I am a good navigator (or nagavator as it sometimes gets called by a six year old) I don't need to turn the map upside down to be able to give directions. OH, and when those directions are ignored I can get us back onto the road we need without having to turn around.
Mr M says that it is impossible to get lost in this country because the furthest you can be from the sea is 78 miles and there is bound to be at least one signpost between where we are and the coast. We have never ended up in someone's farmyard although it has been a close call on a couple of occasions. However there have been lots of serendipitous moments because of our detours the best one being the ford. This was a day when we were going from Bude to St Austell and when we got to three miles from Camelford we found the tailback. There are traffic lights in Camelford because of the narrow road. My map is dead good and shows ALL the roads. Mr M had his Jeep so we turned off the main road and followed the little lanes and byeways. Suddenly there was the ford. We drove through. Mr M stopped the Jeep, turned to me and grinned. He reversed back through the ford and then drove through it again.
"Will you take my photograph driving though?" he asked and the excited little boy expression on his face just melted my heart. Without a second thought I jumped out of the Jeep and prepared to take the pictures. He reversed through the ford again and then slowly drove forward so that I could take lots of pictures. I clambered back into the Jeep and we looked at the pictures just to make sure and then we drove on. As we came out of the lanes not far from the Eden Project Mr M said "It was so good to see you standing out there with the camera, just like old times." And it felt good too.