Mapping with Google

We are going on holidays! All ten of us! This will be our first holiday for over 8 years and the first time ever that our whole family has been away together. Naturally, we are all excited and the children have started making plans and doing a mental pack, already.

After booking the accommodation online, everyone wanted to see the photos of the house where we'll be staying, and that led to the children checking out the sleeping arrangements, choosing beds and identifying their roommates. It was discovered that two of the boys would have to share a double bed. This wasn't welcome news for Adam who, being a middle child, was destined to be one of the co-sleepers. But, compromises are easier to make in new surroundings and an agreement was reached without too much fuss. Surprisingly, Megan found that she could be perfectly happy sharing with her three sisters, once the prospect of sharing with three of her brothers was proposed as the sole alternative!

Once the all-important bedroom arrangements were settled, Adam turned his attention to his holiday itinerary. Using the new iPad, he clicked onto Google maps and explored a map of the area. He investigated the route from our house to the holiday location and worked out how long the journey would take, using the app. He, also, checked out the facilities, within walking distance of the holiday house, and discovered that he could walk to the beach, a park, the general store and some tennis courts. Now, we are deciding what we will need to take with us to take advantage of all that we can do, while we are there.

The Google maps app is a useful tool for learning and, also, for practical use. With the wireless Internet connected, we'll use the app as a GPS to, hopefully, get us to our destination, without our normal U-turns and backtracks. Map reading skills have been sadly lacking in our family, in the past. It is quite normal for the designated map reader to indicate a turn, 30 seconds after passing the turn-off point, and it has even been known for us to travel for extended periods, without the slightest clue as to which page of the map we are traveling on. The worst of these experiences occurred during one of our previous holidays, when I was the chief map reader. We traveled for 45 minutes, with me desperately trying to appear in control of the situation while, all the time, we could have been in another state for all I knew. Eventually, we ended up full circle and I recognised the road we had journeyed on, nearly an hour earlier. I breathed a sigh of relief, told my poor husband that we were nearly there and re-established our position on the state's roads. To this day, I am not proud of my awful deceit and the fact that Andy still thinks that the holiday we chose was actually a lot further away than he'd estimated, but we did maintain a peaceful start to our holiday and that's something not to be taken for granted!

This holidays, armed with our newly-acquired Google map skills, we should avoid all possibility of getting lost or inadvertantly taking the 'scenic' route. There are some instances where technology is more reliable than the human brain and, with our spaghetti map brains, I think this journey may be one of them.