Monday, June 08, 2009

Why I love maps

My wife has come to learn lately that I really enjoy maps. I remember clearly pouring over the maps in Tolkien's "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" books. Trying to follow the adventure, and wondering what lies in those areas of the map that the books don't discuss. My enjoyment of maps continues on with looking at maps of BC (dreaming about places I want to go) maps of trails I want to take ... and I now have an even greater reason to love maps : they keep you from getting lost!

The story starts with the end of our bi-annual Pastors Conference, this year held in Langley BC. Des and I decided to take an extra day to shop, and so some walking in Vancouver. The plan - head to Stanley Park and walk the seawall (8.8kms). I fairly hefty walk, but one I knew would be perfect for the beautiful day that it was. So off we went, shopping a bit in Langley, driving to Surrey, and taking the SkyTrain downtown. My thought was that it should be easy to catch a bus from Canada Place to Stanley Park. However, finding that bus didn't go very well ... ahh well it's a beautiful day, and not a very long walk to the Park - so off we go. Once there, we even decide to cut through the park to make it a slightly shorter walk ... good plan. We reach the Lions Gate Bridge, my toes are a bit sore but it's a beautiful day for walking. We start going around the seawall - magnificent!!

After a good long while, my feet are complaining, and we start thinking that it would be nice to finish this walk and have a nice dinner somewhere. We reach a place called Third Beach, and foolishly decide to cut back through the park to arrive back where we started. So we walk, and walk, and walk, and walk (my toes are now really not feeling well) and arrive back near the Lions Gate Bridge, where we started walking the seawall (weird I thought we'd end up closer to downtown). At this time my feet are just about done, and we decide to take a break at a restaurant we found in the park. After a great meal we trek off, sorta certain which way we're going. We do eventually find our way out of the park, and discovered .... if we could have carried on the seawall, and not tried to cut through the park - it was only 3kms till we would have reached downtown!!!! We were quite close actually. Instead we walked an extra 5 or 6 kms going the way we did!! GROAN! Now, I blame this on two things:

1. I'm a guy, and I don't like to ask for directions.
2. There were no maps on the seawall, that we could see, and therefore we didn't realize how close we were to reaching the end of our walk.

To top it all off, once we were out of the park we had to walk/ hobble our way back to the Skytrain station ... and that is why I love maps! :)

1 Comments:

At 7:38 p.m., Blogger Telkwa CRC said...

Very cute. Just discovered you blog today. Hope you get time to write more!

 

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