The last time I got into a vehicle with a GPS navigation system, it was a rental car with a group of people, and it about drove me batty to watch them listen slavishly to the “Navigation Lady” for when to exit, and seemingly forget to look out the front windshield and notice the giant doggone highway sign that told us to EXIT HERE….until we were already past it.

I almost crawled over from the back seat to take the wheel.

When I get directions, I like to see a visual representation of where I’m going, also known as a “map.”

I do keep updated paper maps in both of our vehicles; they always boot up and don’t require a cell network/satellites/WiFi, but when I’m the lone driver, it is a bit of a pain (oh, OK, and pretty unsafe!) to try to unfold, refold and read one while hurtling down the road, while also fumbling with reading glasses.

The Google Maps function on my Android phone is pretty handy, of course – when it is accurate – but a new feature on it really saved my bacon on a recent trip to San Antonio.  I don’t see how standalone car navigation systems like Garmin and TomTom can stay in business much longer, because I found that the latest Google Maps update to my phone includes a beta version of turn-by-turn voice navigation.

It’s free, but you’ll need Android OS 1.6 and above. It’s not available yet for iPhone or BlackBerry (not something I get to say very often.) My phone is an older Android model so the software gummed up a little a couple of times, but it helped me find a residence in a large subdivision, at night, in a completely unfamiliar area of town, with sight lines obscured by lots of trees.

When I enabled Maps Navigation, it showed me a computerized, “bird’s-eye” sort of elevated view with a big fat line for me to follow. The darker blue arrow in the image above blinks and represents your continuously-updated location and direction. I could have added Street View imagery to the route, but since it was nighttime they wouldn’t have helped much, so I stayed with the basics.

The Navigation Lady’s guiding voice suddenly burst from my phone, saying, “Turn right in one quarter mile at X Street!” and I nearly jumped out of my skin since I wasn’t expecting it. A box popped up saying that for voice-guided navigation, I’d need to install text-to-speech software from the Android market, but I didn’t feel a burning need for voice control of my phone so I didn’t take the time to do that.

Ms. Phone guided me right to the curb of the friend’s house that I was looking for; I liked the simple, clear graphics better than the voice, but the whole package impressed me, especially since it didn’t cost a dime and worked on my older phone.

Maps Navigation also has Transit guidance (for when you’re taking public transportation – currently covers 400 cities) and walking directions (the phone vibrates when you’re supposed to turn.)  You can also add “layers” like the previously-mentioned Street view, Satellite view and the super-handy Traffic view, which shows green/yellow/red along your route, based on traffic conditions. Avoid those pile-ups!

Here’s a quick look at what Street view looks like, in case you’re unfamiliar with it….direct link on YouTube here.

My next purchase is some sort of dashboard mount for the phone, since it looks like me and the Navigation Lady are going to be good friends.

If you like this post, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS feed or by email – the email signup link is at the top of the right sidebar near the Search box. Thanks!)

Perhaps you’ve been saddened by reports coming out of the Horn of Africa.

The eastern part of Africa is going through the worst drought the area has faced in decades. In Somalia, this difficult situation is made worse by political unrest, so that people are leaving the country for safety as well as to seek food and work. Kenya, Ethiopia, and other neighboring countries face their own problems with the drought and are now also dealing with refugees from Somalia streaming in.

There are many thoughts about what could have, might have, and should have been done to prevent this situation. PBS Newshour offers a balanced story on this.

Whatever you may decide about causes and solutions, at this time, people need food to live. What if there were a way for you help provide for that need, learn something in the process, and it would not cost you anything?

You might even have fun in the process. The UN World Food Program has a site called Free Rice, which has two purposes: to provide education for all, and to help those in need by providing food. What happens is, visitors to the site can choose to play educational games. You can build your vocabulary skills in English, French, and several other languages, try your hand at math equations and chemistry problems, see how much you know abut world literature, identify countries on the map or see if you know flags of the world, for example. You can switch among topics as you like, as well, and there is no sign in required. For each answer you get right, you’ll see a little graphic indicating that ten grains of rice have gone to the program. You can also read further at the site to see what this means and how sponsors pay for this.

This site has been up and running for some time, and it’ll be around after the crisis in east Africa has faded from the headlines. It offers a continuing way to help the world’s hungry, and to learn new things about the world while doing so.

other ways you can help the situation in the Horn of Africa

Consider subscribing to Perceptive Travel through email or
RSS feed.

A few years ago, I told my family that when I die, I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered in the Mediterranean Sea.

But that was before I discovered the Cambria Cemetery in Central California.

Hidden in the hills behind the small village of Cambria, surrounded by huge Monterey Pines, wild flowers, and wildlife, this cemetery has been the final destination for many Cambrian residents since it was established back in 1870.

It’s got to be one of the most peaceful cemeteries in the world.

It’s also one of the most creative and artistic.

Reflecting the personalities of its residents (and their families), many of the cemetery’s gravestones are decorated with fun, colorful, and even musical objects.

Many even have uniquely handmade benches and chairs alongside the gravestones.

Here the dead are not forgotten. Instead, they are warmly embraced.

Story and photos by Edward Readicker-Henderson

Exploring the northern finger of Alaska, where mammoths roamed when the continents were one. Now changes are coming again as the musk oxen move to higher ground.

The reindeer sound like sleigh bells.

Maybe fifty of them, trotting down the middle of the road, shoulder to shoulder yet somehow keeping their antlers from tangling.

The reindeer sound like sleigh bells. The heavy jog of their muscles, the click of the tendon in their ankle that would make them the most efficient walkers on the planet, if only they had any real interest in walking, if only they weren’t, biologically, just fat, lazy caribou. Give them a thumb and a TV remote, they’d be really happy.

Which does bring up the question of why they’re running down the road to begin with. Grizzly? Probably.

I’ll never see the bear, though. The barren-ground grizzlies around here get to about twelve hundred pounds, but can turn invisible in the willows, blend into the tundra, hide in the old dredges that once searched for gold by eating entire rivers, and are now hulks slowly disappearing themselves in time.

In fact, I will never see any of the things I came here to see. Which is okay, because I knew that would be the case before I got on the plane, because what I came here to see doesn’t exist anymore.

The unaccustomed features of the situation with which we are confronted … necessitate the greatest caution as regard all questions of terminology. Speaking, as it is often done of disturbing a phenomenon by observation, or even of creating physical attributes to objects by measuring processes is liable to be confusing, since all such sentences imply a departure from conventions of basic language which even though it can be practical for the sake of brevity, can never be unambiguous. (Niels Bohr)

Reindeer are not what I’ve come here to see at all, because I’ve seen them here before. Once, one night, I left the hotel here in the bright sunlight about eleven p.m. to go for a walk. Got out onto the street, turned around, went back into the hotel. “Um, is the reindeer in the back of the truck a normal thing?”

“That’s Velvet,” the clerk said.

I had already fallen in love with Nome, jutting out from the coast of Alaska like a finger pointing to the North Pole: the way the people talking about “ounces” in the restaurants meant gold, not drugs, the way the Bering Sea rolled against the seawall, slapping against shivering men still trying to turn the beach into riches, as if not a moment had passed since the 1901 gold rush. I loved the fact that the grocery store sold ATVs next to the meat counter, as if offering you a choice between a real world and a world wrapped in Styrofoam. I loved walking past the sign that said this is where the Iditarod ends every year: after mushers have taken teams of sled dogs over a thousand miles, they end up in a town where the most popular restaurant is simply called “Airport Pizza.”

And now this, a reindeer standing in the bed of a pickup truck, happily munching on a bale of hay.

“Velvet.”

“Velvet.”

“And will Velvet object if I take her picture?”

“Velvet will be fine with it, but don’t get near the dog in the front of the truck. He thinks it’s his job to protect her.”

Today, Stinger, the dog in our own un-reindeered truck, sleeps. He knows we’re not going to let him chase these sleigh bell impersonating reindeer. Nor are we going to let him protect the reindeer, should that thought cross his doggie mind. And it’s not like he hasn’t been having some fun. We’ve stopped a bunch of times to let him bark at the few salmon, still running through the pan-shallow streams, looking like props from a zombie movie. Plus, his tennis ball, stuffed into the glove compartment to keep him from obsessing, is stained and drenched with blueberry juice. A half hour or so outside Nome, we’d stopped, standing on blueberries, running on blueberries, pausing between throws to eat blueberries that grew on plants the size of origami prayers and that tasted like a sun that refuses to set.

The ball splashed blueberry when it struck the ground.

On an 1850s chart, the mapmaker, eyes weary from a shadeless midnight, labeled this blueberried finger of land “? Name,” as if language were not quite enough to contain this place.

But what all this area is, really, is a region of off-ramps for a lost world. The Teller off-ramp, where we’re headed, just south of the Arctic Circle. And the Nome—”? Name” turned into a typo confusion of map and territory—off-ramp, 72 miles south of Teller, and where, this time, I can find no trace of Velvet, and where, because there is a political freak show in town, I feel like I have to flip off every single door in the hotel, just to make sure I get her room covered.

Continue to Page 2 of Nome, Alaska

The sparkling and fleeting moments of life, love as powerful magic, the costs of love not told, changes and more changes. learning to let go, loves found and joyous — these are all aspects of emotion Scottish singer and songwriter Eddi Reader takes on while living up to the title of her album Love Is the Way.

In recent years, Reader has been quite identified with her work singing the songs of Scottish national bard Robert Burns and reaching wide audiences with those projects. This recording, however, stakes out her place again as one of the best interpreters and creators of contemporary folk around. Folk with a strong dose of pop, sometimes, folk with thought provoking images and ideas wrapped in sing along melodies that fall easily on the ear, and folk illuminated by Reader’s conversational and graceful soprano.

It’s a good album for late summer summer, too. The opening track, Dragonflies, sets life’s turns and twists and connections in the passing flight of those summertime visitors, and the closing cut, I Wouldn’t Stand in Your Way, touchies on the bittersweet aspects of helping someone you love go off on their own, as in sending a child off to school, perhaps, or a school graduate out into the world.. Reader has said that she hopes listeners will “use this music to soundtrack life a little bit, to sing along with me.” The cuts are well suited for that, Other standout tracks include Roses, Never Going Back (Queen of Scots), and My Shining Star, but really, they’re all good and they all play off differing aspects of love, something always worth learning about, in whatever season.

Consider subscribing to Perceptive Travel through email or
RSS feed. thanks!