I'm the Map...I'm the Map...I'M THE MAP!

I will share more of the details of a trip we took today in the next couple of days but here is the question of the day from my darling daughter. "Mom, how was looking at a map while driving any safer than texting while driving?"

It seems that on this road trip Stacey thought it was very annoying that I would ask her to get out the map from the glove compartment (I know, some of you may not remember those day before GPS and smart phone navigation). I am not saying I don't very much appreciate these modern marvels but, our GPS has bit the dust and we were relying today on my phone which I wasn't used to and didn't like the limited view of the map.

So I asked Stace to grab the map out of the glove compartment. "What?" was her response. She really had no idea what I was talking about. I explained to her that when I was young, all we had was the map or the atlas and we could find our way that way (I actually think it was a rather reliable way to get around however less convenient, definitely!)

She grumbled a bit as she answered "can't I just GOOGLE it?" No, I insisted that I just wanted to look at the map a minute. She did give it to me and as we were tootling along on an open stretch of highway, I located where we were on the map and showed her which country roads we were looking for. I was thinking to myself "they watched Dora...how do they not get the concept of a map?"

Both girls thought the experience was quite burdensome and that is when I realized how much life has changed in just my lifetime. And the debate began on the safety of "map viewing while driving". I told them that USUALLY the person in the passenger seat is the navigator but that I wasn't having much luck with my argumentative pre-teen! "MOM!" was her answer to that. So, I got to walk down memory lane with my map and they got to chalk another one up to "weird things Mom did when she was a girl".