Modern consumer capitalism purports to provide the 21st century person with an array of choice in all manner of areas. However, melding choice with competition actually results in something called ‘choice paralysis’. For sure, monopolies do exist. But in many areas of our lives it is not a monopoly that constrains us, but the time it requires to select a single product from the bountiful shelves of plenty.
Of course, at this point we should acknowledge that for many global inhabitants choices are severely restricted by economic inequality, culture and circumstance. All the more galling then when we allegedly fortunate ones are confronted by a proliferation of spurious alternatives, requiring us to engage our intellectual energies in unnecessary activity. All those resources expended on producing 50 different types of tins of bean when for most people, beans are beans are beans.
In actual fact, Rose and I have somewhat limited intellectual energies. At our age, we much prefer to receive that which will sustain us with very little thought on our part. If it does the job, let’s leave it there. Give me a tin of beans and be done with it.
So, what has all this got to do with maps? Well, it appears that since we took possession of ‘The Garmin’, the field of online navigation has become rather congested. Navigation apps on handheld screens are now ubiquitous. Multiple companies provide opportunities for us to gawp at the way a little blue dot seems to be pointing us in unwanted directions over indeterminate terrain. Provided your phone batteries keep hanging in there.
Why not just use ‘The Garmin’ and be done with it? Good question. Sure, who wouldn’t want to pack their knapsack with a house brick? Granted it has a nice big battery, hence the weight. But it also needs a special charger and special spectacles (its screen is tiny). The Garmin system is great for planning walks on a computer, but you do not actually need ‘The Garmin’ to follow these routes. So, our routes remain in the virtual world and ‘The Garmin’ in the desk drawer.
When Rose first pitched the idea of a walk in the Deutsch woods, he found our wander on an app called Komoot. Using Komoot you can discover crowd sourced wanders completely for free. Rose loves this concept. However, like most similar products, Komoot sucks you into the world of ‘in-app purchases’. In the free version, the maps are basic, and you cannot use the app to actually navigate. Even buying a one-off reasonably priced total world map pushes you further to annual navigation subscriptions and other unnecessary accoutrements. Nonetheless, with a route and the online map you can use Komoot to wander. Hello little blue dot.
As observant readers will note, we have in fact purchased a real-life Kompass paper map with folds and a waterproof cover. A map that will flutter in the breeze and blow away in a gale. Goodbye little blue dot.
However, the good people at the Kompass Karten Company have responded to competition from the online navigation and map providers by replicating their paper maps online themselves. Their maps come with a QR code that once scanned uploads your purchase into their own app. You can even import routes from elsewhere and overlay them on their online map. Welcome back little blue dot!
Enter ‘Pocket Earth’, an app recommended by a travel agency for their self-guided walking holidays. It does the same as the others, is free, and allows us to download our routes (thanks Garmin and Komoot). The embedded map is quite good too. This one has a little blue arrow!
And of course, we have omitted to mention the granddaddy of them all – Google Maps. Renowned for taking east European lorry drivers and unwary holiday makers up impassable alleys and one-way streets, it is nonetheless helpful on a macro scale. Rose and I are, nonetheless, somewhat nervous about being told to jump off 200m high cliffs by the good people at google as a means to shorten a 50m path detour. Plus, you cannot upload a .gpx file to google maps.
Ahh – the .gpx file, the currency of modern navigation. Readable by almost all navigation and mapping apps, we have copied, constructed and liberally dispersed our own .gpx files all over the various mapping products described above. Here it is! We now find ourselves in the (un)enviable position of being able to flip from app to app, from little blue dot to arrow, from blurred to detailed online maps.
We can even unfold our paper version, should we wish to go all retro.
It seems to us, therefore, that most of our wander will be spent peering at our phone screens to see how close our various blue signs are to our intended route. We can imagine heated conversations extolling the accuracy of Komoot, Kompass and Pocket Earth. We may even part company and follow our own preferred pathing app, swapping navigation notes at the end of our days wanders.
Or we can stick together, follow the signposts and look at the scenery.