Map of the Week - The Yard Sale Bonanza!

Our neighbors had a yard sale recently and I picked up a pile of maps for $2! Later on when they left the rest on the curb, my wife picked up another huge pile for nothing! Here are some of the spoils:

Grenada tourism map produced by the Ordnance Survey (U.K.)














Old City detail from"Nice et Agglomeration" by Plans-Guides Blay, Paris.















KLM/Shell map of Ghana - produced by the Survey of Ghana, Accra.


Berndtson & Berndtson (B&B) Map of Costa Rica (laminated!)


Detail of
San Jose
from the
B&B map.










"Pianta di Venezia" - Free tourist map.

The Daily Masshole Obstacle Course

I frequently complain about my commute. Yes it's "only" 8 miles but 8 miles of stress. It is much more stressful than my job and probably the main thing that leaves me drained at night. In addition to the usual problems of heavy traffic, construction, bad roads and "Masshole" drivers, the route itself is a crazy serpentine pattern-there is no straight line to get me there.
Below is a map of my route through eastern Massachusetts. I've generalized it a bit and left off place names to make it less obvious where I live and work. Green text indicates southbound issues, purple northbound and black means the problem is in both directions.

The 8 mile route takes me 25 minutes with no traffic, 35-40 minutes typically and can be up to an hour in bad traffic situations. I can ride my bicycle there in 40-45 minutes when I don't get whacked. Public transit is a 3 bus system and takes an hour and 20 minutes. Walking? I haven't tried that one yet.

Map of the Week 112-Happy Valentines Day from Egypt!

I was working on a google maps project for my job when I started drifting off to other areas of the world. I got mesmerized by the aerial view (bottom right) of a section of the Nile River near Luxor (Al Uqsur) near the bottom of the map below. I decided to try making a quilt a la Nikolas Schiller. The quilt came out OK but on further review, I decided it would make a nice Valentine's Day heart. So enjoy this content-free Valentine's card from Map of the Week!

Map of the Week #100 - Map of 100 Maps!

In honor of the 100th Map of the Week I have gone back, looked at the places I have mapped and made of map of these locations. This is based on the tags below which is not a perfect science since my tags have not been consistent. Sometimes I tag a state when a city is featured, sometimes I forget to (sorry Washington). Sometimes the state seems less relevant to the subject matter. The "USA"tag is also misleading because I tend to use it only for nationwide maps of the U.S. The map above shows all the countries that have been featured. Below are the cities, states and provinces. Yes I do have a pretty obvious bias towards northerly and familiar regions. I will try to look beyond my narrow realm at least a few times in the next 100 maps. Stay tuned.

MOTW #68

This past weekend I did lots of traveling in circles around the Northeast using all kinds of transportation modes. During one of the long rides I decided to see what it would look like to map out my travels so here's what I came up with. Well, it's sort of vaguely interesting anyway. Note that the walking distances are slightly exaggerated (but not by much) - otherwise they'd be invisible at this scale.

MOTW #34

This is a map outlining the places I rode my bike during my May-June bicycling vacation in Quebec. I went up there for the Montreal Bike Festival and did a bunch of other rides in the Laurentians.