It's All About Your (L)attitude....

I've always been interested in maps...  as a kid, my brother, sister and I would make up games using our World Book Encyclopedia as our source.  Our family didn't have a car back then and we walked everywhere.  Most of my travels were through the articles and maps in those books.  I learned about my own state of Ohio as well as the other 47 states...  back then there were only 48.  I learned about other countries - where they were located and much, much more.

I still love maps...  it's probably a good thing because with Bill & my lifestyle these days maps are essential to getting where we want to go.

With the GPS systems available now, maybe reading maps isn't considered quite as important, but sometimes you just can't trust those little rascals...  and sometimes batteries die when you need them the most...  and sometimes...  well, you get the picture.

We learned in elementary school about latitude and longitude....  degrees and minutes...  parallels and meridians....  we learned about the Greenwich England Observatory, where it all begins.

The world is round (or at least mostly so) and in geometry we learn that circles have 360 degrees...    so 180 degrees (latitude) from Greenwich, England going either east or west, is the International Date Line.  I guess there has to be a designated place to distinguish one day from the next, and this is it...  Since I started geocaching 10 years ago I've become even more aware of just where in the world we are...  and I love figuring out how many degrees we are from the equator (I'm always trying to stay warm), and I like knowing what our elevation is and the like.

On our flight from Los Angeles to Tokoyo in October, each passenger had a small "tv" screen that you could watch a movie or play a game....  or...  wooohooo! you could watch the plane's progress as well as view some other data.

Bill called my attention to it...  and just look!

We were less than 2 degrees from the International Dateline...

Yeah, I missed the actual crossing, but that's okay....  by the time I got the camera ready this is the shot I got.

This made me start thinking...  (always a scary thing)...

Wouldn't it be great to be on a ship in the Bay of Guinea, just out of the Atlantic Ocean and off the coast of Africa...  check your GPS and see:

  N000 00.000  W000 00.000

  Right on the equator ... just half way between the North and South Poles and half way either side to the International Date Line!  

What a Hoot!

That's All For Today!