I have taken a few road trips in my life, and have always been fascinated with maps. I won’t claim to be an expert at using one though. Actually, I consider myself lucky if I manage to get where I’m going sometime within the same year I started out in. I exaggerate, of course. To be perfectly truthful, on the trips I have taken, I have seldom been lost for longer than an hour or two. The humiliating part is that usually I am getting lost within just a few miles of home.

I’ve gone on road trips before where it was just me and a “navigator”. That’s the person riding shotgun who has the map and has no idea how to re-fold it once it is open. While I am driving and calling out road signs, this person is frantically telling me to wait a minute, wait a minute, while flipping that Goliath-sized piece of paper back and forth in front of my eyes. Unfortunately, when I am driving on the freeway at 75 miles per hour, with bumper to bumper traffic, and an exit looming rapidly in front of me, I don’t do wait a minute.

That’s why I now consider it wise to arm my navigator with a small, portable map, like those ones that you can download from the internet that give you a highly inaccurate little road map and how-to driving instructions. The driving instructions and mileage chart are actually more useful than the stupid map. We have this one little map of my home state, that is so small that it does not list all of the cities and the ones it does list are so tiny you have to squint to read them. This map also has all of the major cities highlighted in bright yellow.

We always eat our lunch in the car, and if you are stopping to eat that is a mighty good time to review that darn map again. Trouble of it is, while you are eating and map reading, you are likely to have a slight condiment mishap. Since all of the roads are printed in red and all the big cities are in yellow, I have to pause sometimes and wonder if I am looking at Lansing or a mustard stain, or if we are on Interstate 69 or following a drip of ketchup.

There is a big fat bloodstain on that map too, from the trip we took in the middle of the hottest month of the year, to Mosquito City, where our veins were tapped either by swarming vampires or by the biggest, meanest mosquitos we had ever seen. Needless to say, one of those mosquitos had feasted well, and then got swatted by, you guessed it, the rolled up map. That map has been soaked in water, tea and coffee, has been dropped in mud puddles, snow banks and into gutters where it has gotten run over by a taxi on at least one occasion.

That map has seen better days of course, but I wouldn’t part with it now for a million brand new ones. There are a lot of memories in that old map, a lot of trips taken, a lot of rest stops and souvenir stands. It bears the stains of its travels and our travails. It has the road dust from a couple hundred different highways, freeways and two-tracks in the woods. It has been personally autographed by a mosquito. New maps have absolutely no personality at all.

The next time you go on a road trip, get out your oldest map just for nostalgia’s sake and review the creases, stains, rips and faded print and remember. Remember all the places that old map has taken you and smile at the things you have seen together. Then carefully pack it away and download a new one from the internet or buy a new one at the gas station so you can go on your journey with an updated version that will actually instruct you on where the new overpass has been built. No new map will feel just right, however, until it has been thoroughly discombobulated over several years worth of traveling.

If you want to help it along, just grab the mustard and ketchup and do your worst on that map, so that you will feel right at home getting lost with it. Run over it with your car or truck if you can, because tire tread marks look fabulous amid all those little squiggly lines signifying roads and rivers. When you can no longer tell the difference between the roads and the rivers, then you know that your map experience is complete.