While not a CCS member as yet, but since a major affection for maps and OS maps
in particular has been a factor throughout my life, I thought I would add a
childhood anecdote in response to that of Philip Fry's.....

As the child of an artist and a civil engineer maps were an inevitable part of
my childhood world and I adored what they could tell me and what I could do with
them. From an early age they also represented a source of power over otherwise
inalienable forces....through map reading on car journeys..... A few years ago
my mother was relating a popular story of hers and I decided to 'come clean'.
We had driven from Kent to Exeter when I was a child in the 1970s and she and my
father had been appalled by how long the journey had taken. My brother and I
regularly shared the map reading as each parent swapped driving. We didn't like
the long trips much, as there was little scope for getting to grips with the
trip. On this one we hit gold, however, as our parents hadn't planned it in
advance. My brother took the A303 and I took the A30. And we swapped the route
between the two roads each time we swapped drivers. The best changeover took us
over Zig-Zag Hill in Somerset. Fantastic stuff. We were utterly convinced that
we had been rumbled and that they were playing along, but over 25 years later we
discovered why we had never gone back down to Exeter afterwards! They had been
beyond horrified a) by the state of some of the roads and b) by the fact that it
had taken over 10 hours to get there, when it took only a little longer to get
to Edinburgh!!

I still love maps and do not have a SatNav.... But these days they tell me a
great deal more than how to get from A to B via C, D and E, and I love them even
more because of it.

All the best

Amanda