GADLING’S TAKE FIVE: Week of November 26

by Adrienne Wilson on

Am I the only one who can’t believe it is December 1st? Where did November go? Where did the year go? How time flashes! If the end of the week managed to sneak up on you as fast as it got me you might want to review some of these posts found here over the week.

5. ABBA Museum to Debut in 2008:
Come on! You can’t tell me you’re not excited by the news. Get your dancing feet to this one to find out the details on the new Sweden based museum.

4. Maps of the World:
Erik brings our attention to the poor quality of maps too often found in guidebooks and then provides some good resources to finding good maps to take on your trip. AAA and another site new to me called, Just Maps are the only two that he mentions, but it’s a good starting place if you’re completely lost.

3.Magnifique Martinique:
Considering how popular the islands become once winter storms start pounding less tropical lands I thought this piece on the French Caribbean island of Martinique needed extra mentioning. It’s high on my travel agenda for that particular region of the world.

2. Garlic Card:
As a child I was never a fan of garlic, but this is mostly due to my aunt draping it in my window to protect me from vampires. I kid you not. However, some people can’t go a day with seasoning their food with a pinch of garlic. Neil brings us information on a Garlic card that can be used to help bring extra flavor and taste to your meals while camping in the great outdoors. I’m sure it will protect you from vampires in the woods as well, if you buy into that stuff.

1. Space Tourism Details Start to Fill In:
Everyone ready to go to space? More and more details are starting to come in on Space Tourism and it even looks somewhat affordable. If you think about $200,000 is a lot more affordable than $20 million bucks.

Top Map Mashups

by Erik Olsen on

We’re big fans of map mash ups, those wonderful Web 2.0 hacks of Google Maps and other mapping programs. From helping you find the nearest Starbucks to navigating the New York City subways system, they can be immensely useful tools for helping you find what you need (or don’t need for that matter). I stumbled upon this fine little list of the top-ten list of map mash ups that aren’t based on Google Maps over at Lifehacker recently and thought it was worth a quick post. From earthquakes to literature, the eclectic list is worth a quick perusal.

Los Angeles Maps

by Erik Olsen on

I have a rather bittersweet relationship with Los Angeles. On the one had, having lived there for most of my life, I feel like I know what the city has to offer culturally/historically, and I have always felt the town comes up wanting. To me, LA is a one industry town: TV/Film and if you are only mildly interested in these two things…or haven’t dedicated your lief to them…then you might not find LA the most inspiring place. That’s how I feel. But then again, living here in New York, I’m always hearing people bash the city, and more often than not this comes from people who either haven’t visited it, or have gone, but only saw Hollywood Boulevard, Disneyland (not even in LA!) and other tourist hot spots. To these people, I vigorously defend LA and protest that there’s much there to see and experience. See, I’m kinda mixed up?

All this is to direct you for the moment to an interesting resource I stumbled upon that shows lovely old historical maps of the City of Angels. I spent some time gazing at these beauties and found that they reveal much about how the city has developed and matured. Maps are often a great way to understand a place: how it was settled, how it developed, how people might have thought differently about it. these maps, if even in a small way, accomplish that. Kinda cool to check out if you’re from there (like Neil and myself) or not.

VintageMaps.com

by Adrienne Wilson on

Maps are the sort of thing to get real geeked out about and that’s exactly what happened when I stumbled upon this Vintage Maps site. I pretty much flipped my wig. Reading maps is a skill I’d like to develop more and become a pro at doing, but until that time there’s nothing wrong with collecting a few here and there. Looking at vintage and antique maps and the way someone saw the world from who knows what view is something to marvel.

This antique map of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey in Asia looks very different to me, but it could just be the small photo size of the map. If you’ve got a favorite region of the world it might be worth getting one of these vintage pieces for your library in addition to the maps of the modern world. They’re a little pricey in comparison to the maps you would use on the road today, but I’m sure worth every penny.

Maproom Blog

by Erik Olsen on

And while I’m on the subject of maps, let me also send you over to a
wonderful new three years old blog I found on that very topic. The blog is called Maproom, and it is a wonderful read for the cartographically-inclined.

The site is a great resource for those who love maps (and what traveler doesn’t?) and who are interested in how
they are made, who makes them, and how maps are changing. Some of the stuff here can almost seem too techie, too inside
baseball, but most of the posts, while short and sweet, point you to fascinating resources. For example, this post looks at the current
hullabaloo over who actually discovered America. Was it the Chinese? And this one looks at the geology of the Bay
Area.