Bushwhacked this week finds himself and Mrs Whacked well and truly MapWhacked.
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For some time now I’ve suspected that people who have really nasty senses of humour get to come back in the next life as map makers.
It’s odd now, but when I look back on the days of great big, single-sheet travelling maps, they seem like the good old days.
You’d sit in the car, sweating and cursing as you unfolded a map as big as a queen-size bedsheet and – worse –tried to get it to fold back into a flat form again.
But in the past few weeks I’ve had to rely on those fat books of maps, Melways, UBD and VicRoads Country, and it is astonishing how often the place you most want to find sits right at the corner of map, say, 49 which then hooks up to Map 63, but it may just as well dip back on 32 or 15!
Aaaargh.
We had a car club rally last weekend, a brisk little 880 km journey from Bendigo up through parts of the north, down to the edge of Lake Eildon, up again to Mansfield, the King Valley, Myrtleford, Bright then back to Glenrowan, down to Seymour and back home.
It makes me weary just to follow the route on a map.
If I could.
I’ve never become involved into those satellite navigation thingies.
I keep getting put off by news articles of dills who drive their cars off cliffs into the Pacific Ocean, or to turn right up railway tracks and through paddocks just because their sat-nav system told them to.
But I really like maps.
Always have.
I could lose myself in an atlas for hours, wondering about what some places must be like or trying to work out how close Uzbekistan is to Azerbaijan.
When big events happen in the world, such as the Russian invasion of the Crimea, I usually go straight to the maps to get some sense of what’s going on to whom and where.
But in our charming state of Victoria, just the size of a tin-pot central European state, the maps drive me nuts. Nothing ever seems to line up.
We in Bendigo tend to think of Mansfield, Bright and Myrtleford as sort of upper middle Bogong.
No, I’m sorry, that was rude. Upper middle Victoria, a bit to the right and very lumpy.
Pretty in an un-ironed kind of way.
It’s where VicRoads stores all its corners, while it dumps all the long straight bits around Kerang.
So in my mind, they should be on connecting maps, if not just one big one.
But they’re not.
Mrs Whacked was navigating and she readily admits that reading maps while moving is not one of her 1273 favourite things in life.
But she almost got repetitive strain injuries turning the pages and spinning the book round and round trying to get some idea of where we should be heading.
Or, more importantly, where we should NOT be heading.
And we have come to the conclusion that map makers do this on purpose.
You can just imagine them sitting over their drafting tables late at night with tennis shades on their low foreheads, chortling maniacally when they realise they can spread Yarck over four maps.
Or put 17 pages between Whoroully and Whoroully South.