Category Archives: Alan’s stories 2026

MapQuest vs. Google Maps: A Personal Journey Through Navigation

Posted on by
Reply

I remember when navigation meant opening a paper map and hoping I could refold the creases in the right order so the rectangular map would fit back in the glove box.

I used to keep road maps in the car. Rand McNally kept me company. AAA travel agents walked me through the maps and helped plan my route.

On family vacations, my dad stopped along the way, unfolded the map across the hood, and tried to figure out where we were.

In the 1960s, cities expanded, roads changed, and maps quickly fell out of date. Countries change names. Borders move. Entire countries disappear.

Columbus dealt with a similar problem, although his maps had considerably more blank space than mine. On his first voyage in 1492, he charted islands and coastlines in the Caribbean, adding information to the European maps. Early explorers thought they had reached Asia.

Maps have always been snapshots of what somebody thought the world looked like at a particular moment.

Africa provides plenty of examples. The Gold Coast became Ghana. Northern Rhodesia became Zambia. Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. The Belgian Congo became Zaire, then the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Those changes reflected independence, revolution, political change, and the rejection of colonial names.

Then the Soviet Union became the mother of all map revisions. If you owned a map of the USSR in 1990, you had a collectible.

In 1991, the Soviet Union disappeared, and 15 independent countries emerged from its former republics. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, the Central Asian republics, and others became countries rather than chunks of a giant red blob.

Imagine being the guy at the map company who got that phone call.

“Hey, Bob. You know that giant country we’ve been printing for 40 years?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it isn’t there anymore.”

“Great. I’ll call the printer and see if we can cancel that last order.”

The world’s constant change is one reason digital maps make so much sense. Digital maps can be updated overnight.

Then MapQuest came along.

MapQuest moved the old business of producing maps and driving directions online. In 1996, it launched its web mapping service and became a pioneer of online interactive maps and driving directions. I could access MapQuest on my Palm Treo. I had to write down the driving directions, though.

In the early 2000s, MapQuest gave up its top spot to predatory Google Maps and Apple Maps. Between the two of them, they turned everybody’s phone into a dashboard navigator.

I used them both until today, when I went back to MapQuest.

There’s a reason.

In January 2025, the federal government renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The Interior Department updated the federal Geographic Names Information System and directed federal agencies to use the new name. The United States couldn’t make the rest of the world change its maps.

Then in 2026, the government changed Lake Ontario’s name to Lake America.

Google Maps and Apple Maps changed their digital maps. U.S. users see Gulf of America, while users in Mexico and Canada see Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, respectively.

That’s when I decided I’d had enough and switched over to MapQuest. I’m a simple fellow and don’t like change.

It turns out MapQuest didn’t go along with the Lake America or Gulf of America renames. The OG digital map appealed to me again.

I like the idea that my navigation app won’t make me relearn geography.

At least for now.

This creates a new problem if MapQuest changes its mind.

My solution?

I keep an out-of-date hard-copy Rand McNally road atlas in the pocket behind the driver’s seat, where nobody can update it while I’m driving.

While driving through the middle of nowhere, I had no cell service in eastern Colorado. The apps didn’t work. I pulled into a truck stop.

No maps.

Walmart had one.

If everything else fails, I’ll pull over, get out the atlas, stare at it for five minutes, and pretend I know where I am.

I get curious when I research my stories.

Rand McNally began in Chicago when printer William H. Rand hired Irish immigrant Andrew McNally in 1858. The company began as a traditional printing company.

In 1924, Rand McNally published the “Auto Chum,” which evolved into the road atlas that became essential reading for generations of American motorists.

Car Wash Meditation

Posted on by
Reply

Do you intentionally meditate?

I’ve been trying to slow down by gardening, getting rid of my stuff so I don’t have to worry about what to do with it later.

I showed up at the gym for a drop-in class and didn’t make the cut.

Too many people, not enough spots. One of the hazards of spontaneity.

I had an hour to kill.

My Volkswagen ID.4 looked like it had recently crossed a biblical insect plague. I’d just returned from a couple of road trips: one to Casper for the Wyoming Writers Conference and another to a summer solstice party in Cheyenne.

Hundreds of miles of highway had transformed the front end and the windshield into a natural history museum of insect remains.

A car wash seemed like a productive use of my unexpected free time.

I picked up a Soccer Sandwich Special at Subway, fought my way around road construction, and pulled into the Gloss Auto Wash next door. The menu offered several packages. I chose the basic exterior wash.

“Do you want to drive it through or do you want us to do it?” the attendant asked.

“What’s the difference?”

“It’s faster if you do it,” she said. “Just follow the line.”

I had never driven through one of these conveyor-style washes before. Usually, someone would climb in while I waited outside wondering if my car will emerge intact.

The guy doing the prewash pointed toward a sign.

“Put it in neutral and keep your hands off the wheel.”

I turned off the radio.

This must be what riding in a self-driving Waymo cab feels like.

The car rolled forward on its own while workers sprayed down the front and back ends. This wasn’t one of those fully automated washes where machines do everything. It was a labor-intensive operation with people hosing, scrubbing, and prepping each vehicle before the machinery took over.

As I entered the tunnel, I couldn’t help thinking of a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode. Cheryl takes a colon cleanser to cure a cough, gets trapped in a car wash, exits the vehicle for a reason that quickly becomes too much information, and leaves Larry to deal with the consequences. It remains one of the more memorable, and uncomfortable, television depictions of a car wash.

Fortunately, my experience was considerably less dramatic.

The brushes never touched the car, but water thundered across the glass from every direction. I could feel the vibration. For a few minutes I sat in a cocoon of splashing water, humming motors, and blurred blue light.

The outside world disappeared.

No traffic. No road construction. No deadlines. No gym class I wasn’t getting into anyway.

Just water.

It struck me that we spend a lot of time looking for relaxation. We schedule it. Pay for it. Download apps designed to teach us how to sit quietly.

Yet here I was finding a few unexpected moments of peace in the middle of a midday car wash.

The conveyor eventually carried me back into daylight. One of the attendants pointed at an open drying stall. Four guys descended on the ID.4 with red rags, wiping away every remaining drop, even opening the doors to dry the jambs.

A few minutes later, the bug cemetery was gone.

I drove away with a clean car, a good deal on lunch, and the realization that the best part of a missed appointment is the unexpected place it takes you.

In my case, it was a moving meditation wrapped in soap, water, and a bunch of guys drying my car with a personal touch, a reminder that the universe knows when I need a pause, even if it has to disguise it as a car wash.

My $33 tomato

Posted on by
Reply

How’s your garden this summer?

Last night, I decided to make a Chicago dog.

I had all the essentials lined up on the counter: a hot dog and bun, relish, peppers, sauerkraut instead of pickle, celery salt, and tomato.

The tomato was supposed to be the star of the show.

Earlier this summer, I decided to turn my brown thumb into a green thumb. A local nonprofit, Growing Gardens, held its annual vegetable plant sale. I came home with a single Beefsteak tomato plant. I repotted it, gave it fresh soil, watered it faithfully, and watched it take off like it had discovered its life purpose.

Every day I checked on it.

Every day it got bigger.

Eventually, one tomato emerged as the chosen one. While a few other blossoms appeared, the plant seemed determined to pour all its energy into producing a single magnificent fruit.

Today was harvest day.

I picked the tomato and admired it for about 30 seconds before noticing a blemish on the bottom. No problem, I thought. Tomatoes get spots.

Then I cut it open.

Half the inside had spoiled. It looked like a melanoma had taken over the fruit. The plant had spent weeks concentrating all of its resources on one tomato that had gone bad from the inside out.

I trimmed away the damaged sections and salvaged what I could. The remaining pieces made it onto the Chicago dog and, to be fair, tasted pretty good.

Still, I couldn’t help doing the math.

The tomato plant, $9.

The pot, $14.

The potting soil, $10.

That means the tomato on my Chicago dog carried an investment of $33.

Even by Boulder standards, that’s an expensive tomato.

Of course, gardening isn’t about return on investment. If it were, nobody would do it. Gardeners spend money on plants, soil, cages, hoses, and tools, then celebrate when they grow something they could have purchased at the grocery store for 99 cents.

Yet next spring, I’ll try again.

Gardening is an act of optimism. I planted the tomato because I believed that with enough sunshine, water, and patience, I’d harvest a bumper crop. I hoped for a basket of tomatoes. Instead, I got one expensive tomato with a tragic flaw.

Wall Street investors chase quarterly earnings reports. Gardeners stare at a few blossoms and convince themselves that next year’s harvest is going to be spectacular.

My first tomato may have been a financial disaster, but I’ve already caught myself checking on those remaining blossoms.

That’s how gardening gets you.

No matter what happened this season, there’s always another tomato growing somewhere on the vine.