Maps

There's something romantic about old-fashioned paper road maps. I don't mean candle-lit dinners, roses and wine. It's more Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron. This feeling wouldn't be lost on them. Robert Pirsig would ascribe it to the romantic rather than classical. It is of the heart and spirit, not of facts and reasoning. It isn't of lights and satellites, AI and re-calculating: it's in the air of this small pub, eyes watching as we draw lines across contours; boots pass to share their stories and insights; eyebrows dance to the scale of our endeavour and a quick check of the gazetteer to find that place we just lost.

Each year as the Summer stretches on, our crew of travellers descend upon our favoured watering holes to pour over maps in search of our next great adventure. Laid out in front of us is a world, or at least a Europe, of opportunity.

"It's that time of year again?" is the call from over the bar. The first round sunk to the tune of the latest news. Animals at a watering hole, excited at the prospect of something about to occur. Then the maps unfold. The goal is usually predetermined. Not cast iron, but enough to give us a compass direction. A pencil and paper are the tools of the trade. This is the essence of planning a real adventure.

I should take a second to point out that our yearly trips usually take a more romantic vibe unto themselves. Where we pick stopovers and ideal routes, nothing is set in stone, and nothing, as they say, survives contact with the enemy. A town chosen as a destination is more hypothetical than anything. Weather, roads or whims may take us in a direction further from the A to B of modern route planning. But that's the point of the journey. No destinations are finite. No accommodations are booked in advance. We ride until we stop. We stop until we're rested. When we rest we review the plan and so on and on until the real world beckons us home again.

And so back to our road maps strewn across the table and another round for our troubles.

The thing is, on these evenings, we are often hard-pressed to resolve any of the significant questions regarding our trip. And this is the fault of the romantics. There's nothing in the classical techno-wizardry of Sat Navs and smartphones which draws an audience. No glaring screen or route guidance can cause a stir in the seats like a paper map on a pub table. In this, the holiest of grounds, the adventurer awakens. The curious and un-inducted stop by on a reconnaissance of their own. "What is this thing we're doing?" "Where are we going?" "By what means?" "How far?!" The seasoned and provincial lend a thought to the discussion and recount past glories of their own. There's a buzz about the place and much a to-do, but not much really gets done. We waste the hours discussing with the denizens that which we are about to undertake, but don't really progress with any of the finer details.

I think that's the point of it. We don't travel to get places and we don't ride motorbikes to arrive. We journey to discover, and what we tend to discover most is the culture and people around us. This, through the invitation afforded by the piece of paper before us, is an extension of that process. We hear tales from others as though we're already on our way. We encounter new people from just around the corner. We discover our own little piece of the world just that bit more. And when it comes to hitting the road, we know sort of where we're going. We'll fill in the blanks day by day.

If you haven't tried it before, next time you're planning a trip, do away with the TomTom, Garmin and Google and give Michelin, Philips and the AA a go instead. Have a destination in mind, but figure out the details for yourself on the route. What looks good, and what doesn't? What have you enjoyed so far, and what do you want to steer clear of? That is if you can get beyond discovering the world and its inhabitants sitting at the table next to yours...