Maps are leh-suh

For his Travelers Webelos activity pin, scouts need to complete half a dozen different travel tasks.   Some are nice and easy for us like 'pack for a trip'.  He is always packs for himself (while I watch and double check)  But then there is the nearly impossible task.  Dude is supposed to look at a map and find two routes to a nearby destination.

Apparently using google maps and mousing over different routes isn't good enough.

I tried to pawn the chore of helping Dude with this onto either his dad or my father in law.  No luck.  Apparently they found plenty of excuses to avoid it and then they both took naps.  I should like to point out here, I don't drive.  I haven't driven regularly since before the 'Y2K' fiasco.  And before that I was well known for getting lost.

So first Dude looks at a map of all of Pennsylvania, he finds our town and the town the zoo is in.  Then he easily names a couple main roads between the two.  Unfortunately he can't even see the road we are on, nor the road the zoo is on.  The 'zoom' key on a paper map seems to be missing.

So I hunt up a map closer up.  This one doesn't have the town we are in, but it does have the one with the zoo.  I  show Dude how you can look on the 'list' of streets to find which quadrant the actual zoo is in.  No zoo listed.  So we pulled out the toy netbook to google the actual street address of the zoo.  Dude wanted to know if we could just click 'maps' and find the directions.

When we have the street name and compare that part of the map to the little mini preview online we are certain we know where we are going.

Great, the zoo has been around for over 100 years and they still felt no need of putting it on the map!

Oh well, we can at least get close.  Though having been to the zoo several times recently I can assure you the streets close to the zoo on the map are wrong.

So we made some good guesses squinted a great deal trying to read street names, and started hoping the zoo had some decent signs directing us.  (they don't)

Then all we had to do was find a map connecting our little town to some point up in the city.  Found one pretty nifty, but so old no major highways were listed.

We finally figured out how to get there.  We waited for the guys to wake up and asked them!

If nothing else I am certain Dude now knows how wonderful google maps can be!