Maps: Before and After

Last summer... A rough hand-sketched map, made with 2 old pieces of paper. That's how my map started out. Imagine that! Although it seems I spoke too soon about getting all this on my new map, as I missed the road that heads for the hills. (Hill Road for short.)

...But I don't care about that little detail. One thing for sure is that I now have every old map detail I WANT on my new map now. I'm not wasting time with terrain design or neighboring houses THIS time.

The colors on my map may all seem pretty crazy and chaotic there, but that was actually my first attempt to log my mapping progress. (My second attempt was my "Handy Dandy Notebook", capturing these old map dates, plus 3 more days of expeditions that June.)

The back of my map had a color-coded key for which areas I explored when, and a picture of a 2-inch spider.

A spider?? What's with the spider? Some people are SCARED of spiders, you know!

Funny story, actually. Those 3 days listed on the back of that old map, I'd walk the dogs after dinner while my mom, dad, my sister, grandma, and grandpa would keep talking. Then I'd come back and show them what I put on my map.

On one of those evenings after my trip, I took off my shoes and the dogs' leashes, grabbed my map, and headed to the room everyone was in. Right before I step into that room, a great big spider RUNS RIGHT PAST me, RIGHT under the mini-fridge. ...It was huge AND crazy fast. I was the only one who saw it! I jumped like I just saw the zombified doctor of zomberry island, but resisted my reflexes to step on that spider without any shoes. My family's got a LOTTA stories about stepping on spiders without shoes... NOT GOOD.

...Anyway, Since no one else saw the spider (and since we weren't able to find it either), I had to describe the spider I saw, and that's why I drew that picture. ...Pretty freaky. We didn't know what kind of spider that was, and you never know WHAT might cross your path and when.

...But enough of last year's stories. On with the now! My new map is much larger, 15 papers combined instead of 2, and it took me longer to put it together. Even if you don't count the field trip around the house, I still went on 7 map expeditions so far. That's already more than my 6 expeditions last June, and it's not even June again yet!... But the results are much better, now that they are to scale.

The biggest difference though is that instead of color-coded rough drafts or pocket-sized notebooks, I'm now keeping track of all of my expedition progress right here in my HQ!

...I admit I wasn't sure about logging my map progress here at first but considering all the different ways I tried and failed to log it all before, I realize that this was actually one of the smartest choices I made.

Wow! ...I'm a GENIUS! heh heh heh!