Tuesday, May 3, 2016

A Path Less Traveled

I am borrowing a little something from Robert Frost. When I moved here, I was amazed at how strongly woven into the fabric of New Hampshire he is. But that is a topic for another day.

I was watching a TV show the other day and the characters were on an impromptu trip to the ocean. One character commented that he had not met someone in a long time that didn't have GPS in his car (the show was from the era not so long ago before smart phones). The driver said that the map they were using was a fine GPS for their purposes. I totally agreed with this - having at least 10 map books in my car at any given time. Don't get me wrong, I am a inveterate Waze user most of the time, but travel is totally different using Waze rather than a map. I've mentioned before, that I like to just travel around places I have never seen, thus the maps. But the magic of a map over a GPS is you can and do take the path less traveled, and as a result see some wonderful things you would have missed following the direct routes offered by GPS systems. For a while, I was accused of having a homing instinct for dirt roads (dirt roads in NH look just like any road on NH maps). Yes, we found a lot of the dirt roads in NH, but we also found beautiful nooks of NH we would have missed staying to the main roads.

I feel the same way about using our online PAC (public access catalog). It gets me right to what I want, just like a good GPS. But at the same time, nothing can beat just browsing through the stacks, happening upon a hidden gem to read. Finding something that sparks your interest when you didn't even know it would interest you, coming across that old favorite to revisit, or that title you meant to read and forgot when other titles came along.

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