Now call me traditional and old fashioned but I do prefer good old maps or even Google prints out to such such modern things as Sat Navs and GPS. Maybe it is the love of most things paper that I have, perhaps it is the smoothing out of the folded sheets and its crackle that I love. Or maybe it is the dislike of someone telling me what to do - repeatedly if I don't listen the first time. I like to study maps, I like to see where I've been, where I am and where I am going. I like to look at the places I am passing by, I like to see the place names, the streams, the lakes and the rivers that I pass. I like to see the roads bypass each other and inter-twine as they go from one place to another through each other, over each other and into each other. I like to trail my finger along the paper, following the route of one particular road that I am travelling on, following its beginning in one place through to its end in another part of the country. I enjoy that. I like to see the highways/motorways, the B roads and lanes as they trail off to various locations whether it be a City, a Town or a Village. I like to look at the road colours, the symbols used for railroads, churchs, museums and other places of interest. I simply find maps interesting, fascinating and can study them for hours, I like to have that structure and map in my head of where I'm travelling from and to. I like to be able to see the roads in my head and know when to turn off or where I'm turning into, I want to be able to see my journey ahead of me, miles ahead of me before I undertake it - to know and see what is surrounding me at all times and then I can see all my options laid out before me of which way to travel and what to see.

With GPS and Sat Navs you simply don't get this. You put up the gadget, you tell it where you want to go, which can take time in its own right as you have to trawl through all the options of what the Sat Nav has to offer you only to find the options they have are none of the ones you want. The Sat Nav either doesn't understand the address you gave it, doesn't recognise the zipcode or postcode that you put in or it simply trys to tell you that the address/zipcode/postcode doesn't exist when you know it does. In America it appears that the GPS system will offer you ever Main Street in every State in the US with the exception of the one you want. Or it simply doesn't recognise the airport or it trys to take you on the highway for 30 minutes in order for you to turn back on yourself on smaller roads for 10 minutes in order for yu to get somewhere that is 20 minutes away from where you start in walking distance. Now to a British person you might just walk this, but as an American you won't. You drive. This is what I learnt from my American friends. So you spend 5 to 10 minutes swearing and fiddling with your GPS before starting your drive, only to swear at and then ignore the GPS because you don't like the way it tells you to go, so you then take your frustration out on fellow drivers and all this slowly leads to what is commonly known as 'Road Rage'.

But enough of that. This is about maps. In particular Toronto maps, I recently went o Toronto for the first time. I was looking forward to it, I know people who have been and have very much enjoyed the City. It is world famous for its Film Festival every September and its CN Tower. So I checked into the HI Toronto and naturally picked up a map. The very kind

Receptionist marked off a few places on the map for me, like where the hostel was located, where there were good eating houses and, of course the CN Tower. As I took to the streets what I wanted though was a Tourist Information Centre as the leaflets in the hostel related to nothing in the local area, they did however, offer me information on hostels located in Finland or (if I am a Canadian National) internships in Belgium and Germany. With these offered leaflets being completely useless to me I began my search following the map. Now Tourist Informations are easy to see on maps because of the clever way they do symbols that everyone understands. On these maps they are marked by a blue question mark and I could that there were a few of them. Sadly, as I arrived at various locations having followed the map for the nearest Information Centre I found nothing. I walked around several times under the Metro bridge and around the Bus Terminal, up and down the road and even asked a few people, including a hot dog vendor but he answered to the negative, shaking his head and confirming what I thought, that there was indeed no Tourist Information around these parts. however, it appears he was wrong too, because there is one and it is in the Metro Station itself underground. Now without opening another can of worms I couldn't help but notice that this was hardly a Tourist Information Centre but more of a 'Tourist Information stand' with a few leaflets dotted around the stand then repeated as you followed it round to where you begun. So not only did it take way to long to find, it was useless .

I don't know if anyone else has ever had this problem but a few days later it took me an hour to get to the Zoo when it should have taken me around 20 minutes. So to Toronto City Council - get someone on those streets and get your maps sorted. But if they don't at least next time I know not to trust their maps and to use my own - from within the memories of my mind.