Google Street View Goes Up Manitoba 391

At long last, you can drive virtually to all the way to Lynn Lake on Manitoba 391 using Google Street View. This route takes you through Leaf Rapids, where I spent a memorable childhood; it's also where Sean was born. 

You can even explore certain parts of Leaf Rapids itself, though why Google didn't map the whole town while they were up there is beyond me--they didn't even capture the Town Centre, the community's primary infrastructure. 

But I did notice this: 

We moved to Leaf Rapids so that Dad (with Mom's help) could set up and manage the new Acklands store, seen here on the right. To the left of the old Acklands building is the former Midi Mart, the town convenience store, home of the Wigwag candy bar and Pink Elephant popcorn, among many other treats. All abandoned now. 

Oyoubyourys

I made this simple map of a fantasy planet with a browser tool called Inkarnate. Even using the limited tools available with the free version, you can generate a pleasing map for display or your favourite roleplaying game. Pretty nifty. 
 

Realm of Earl December 2018

The Realm of Earl - that is, the places I've been on our planet - has expanded a bit since I last updated the map. As you can see, I've extended my travels in the American midwest and the eastern seaboard.

I'm hoping to visit Newfoundland and/or the Maritimes next year. I had initially planned to visit Florida, but now I'm thinking staying in Canada might be the better choice. As for Europe...2020, perhaps? 

Project Aurora Frontier

CLICK TO EMBIGGEN this custom map depicting the insane future world of PROJECT AURORA FRONTIER, in which I, Earl J. Woods, as Minister of Transportation, decide that the people of Canada's north have been tragically underserved when it comes to accessibility to the rest of the nation. The red lines on the map are existing major highways. The yellow lines are the ones I propose to build in this brave new world. As you can see, I've build roads to connect every municipality in Canada's north to the more populous regions of the south. So congratulations, men and women of CFB Alert - you can now drive all the way to London, Ontario, should you desire, and vice-versa.

A little research shows that the recently-opened 137-km highway from Inuvik to Tuktoyuktuk cost $300,000,000, which leads me to believe that it costs about $100,000,000 per 46 km of highway in Canada's north. Now, I'm not going to pretend that my attempt to use the length the line from Inuvik to Tuktoyuktuk to create a scale and see the length of the yellow lines I'd drawn is anywhere near accurate, but by my quick estimation, the highway system I propose is at least 1,000 times the size of the Inuvik-Tuktoyuktuk span. Not to mention the fact that I have bridges built across the top of Hudson Bay, the Cabot Strait, etc.

I'm guessing that this project might cost at least $500 trillion dollars. That compares to a mere $144 billion for the entire Apollo program. Indeed, apparently the wealth of every person in the world only adds up to $241 trillion.

Still...heck of a road trip. 

Animated Real-Time Globes

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, someone is going to invent a globe that's connected to the Internet and has some kind of drawing capability so that the globe can update national boundaries, country and city names, and so on, in real time. For example, if we'd had this technology in the 90s, it would have shown the borders changing as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia crumbled. More recently, it could perhaps show the shifting fronts of the Syrian civil war, or the disappearance of North Yemen, Eritrea's liberation, and so on.

I'm pretty sure the various technologies to create this probably all exist; they just haven't been combined into my realtime globe. Someone invent this and I'll buy one! 

Extraterrestrial Globes

My colleague Ayesha has a handsome globe in her cubicle. I was admiring it the other day, and a thought struck me: wouldn't it be cool if you could buy high-quality globes not only of Earth, but of the alien worlds described in fantasy and science fiction? Here's a list of globes I'd love for the den:

• Mars, as imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Mars, as imagined by Ray Bradbury
• Mars, as imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Venus, as imagined by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Mongo, from the Flash Gordon comic strips
• Earth, as imagined in the DC comics universe
• Tatooine, from Star Wars
• Hain, from The Dispossessed
• Dune, from Dune
• Trantor, from Foundation
• Altair IV, from Forbidden Planet
• Vulcan, from Star Trek
• United Earth, from Star Trek
• Caprica, from Battlestar Galactica
• Solaris, from Solaris
• Krypton, birthplace of Superman
• Earth, as imagined by George Orwell

What worlds would you harbour in your home? 

Realm of Earl June 2016

As noted back in 2012, keeping my map of travel conquests up to date is a tricky business, and this map reflects further refinements to my methodology. I'm trying to map the furthest extent of my travels and fill in the spaces between those outermost points as if they're now Realm of Earl territory. This inevitably leads to some distortions, as connecting the dots creates the illusion that I've been to more places than I have. For example. I've been to Singapore and Honolulu, but I haven't been to the Philippines. Nor have I visited northern Mexico. On the other hand, since that last map I've been to western Costa Rica, expanding my territory slightly southward in the western hemisphere.

A number of priority destinations remain unvisited thanks to various personal circumstances:

• London, UK
• Yellowknife, NT
• Montreal, QC
• Halifax, NS
• Charlottetown, PEI
• Fredericton, NB
• New York, NY

And as noted last month, I'm hoping to visit Cerulean, KY next year to see a solar eclipse. If we make it, and if we drive as planned, that might add quite a bit of new territory to the map. 

States Earl Has Visited

I almost shouldn't count North Dakota, since my parents took me there when I was an infant and I don't recall anything about it.

Sometime reasonably soon I'd like to visit Texas to see the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Florida, to see Cape Canaveral; Washington, DC, for any number of monuments and museums; New York, for the same reason; Louisiana, for New Orleans; Massachusetts, for Boston; Maine, to see Stephen King's house; Illinois, for Chicago; and Wyoming, for Yellowstone. Oh, and South Dakota for Mount Rushmore. 

Realm of Earl, June 2012

Some weeks ago I posted a map of an imaginary Dominion of Earl with borders crafted from the outermost reaches of my travels. Our trip to Mexico made an update necessary, but rather than just expanding my borders to include the Yucatan and Quintana Roo I also fired the domain cartographers and hired more accurate surveyors. Thus, this new map expands to the south, but its northern borders are more conservative, reflecting stops I've made in northern Saskatchewan and Alberta and Kenora, Ontario.

I've also renamed my demesne the Realm of Earl, mainly because "realm" and "Earl" are near-anagrams.

I'm hoping my next big trip will take us somewhere to Europe; Sylvia and I have had France and the UK on our list for a while now, but the circumstances haven't lined up yet. Maybe next summer or fall...in the meantime, I might make a quick road trip up to Yellowknife just so I can cross another territory and Canadian capital off my list. New York City is also on our short list, which would expand the Realm's borders to the Atlantic coast.

But that will have to wait until I find a new job and replenish the Realm's treasury. Heavy lies the head that wears the crown!

Domain of Earl, May 2012

I've always loved maps, particularly political maps. I also love exploring our world. I thought it might be fun to combine these two geographic obsessions into one amusement: what if I carved an imaginary empire by drawing straight lines between the farthest-flung cities and towns I've visited thus far?

Thus I present the Domain of Earl, a benevolent but unrecognized empire composed of borders drawn between Fairbanks, Alaska; Dawson City, Yukon; Lynn Lake, Manitoba; Timmins, Ontario; Hull, Quebec; London, Ontario; Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona; Los Angeles, California; Honolulu, Hawaii; Singapore; Seoul, South Korea; and Tokyo, Japan.

The nice thing about an empire of this nature is that I can vastly increase its size with a simple trip to the Mayan Riviera or the UK. Also, I have no pesky subjects to worry about or wars of conquest to manage. Eat your heart out, Napoleon.