Yep. All the time.
I hate to fly, so will sit and plan long road trips and do a virtual drive across the county.
I have no life. 
I’d bet a paycheck that this crowd would love http://www.confluence.org/ and all the nooks and crennies you can get into there!
This is the most fun thread I’ve seen in weeks! We need us a club!
I’ve always wanted a Geochron. Maybe not that particular one; it’s quite pricey, and it’s at Walmart for $3,300. :eek:
God, yes! Spent hours as a kid poring over everything from local street maps to the world atlas. And not so much nowadays (as a parent, I have way less free time to while away than I did as a kid), but I love doing it when there’s something that sparks my curiosity where a map would be the best place to go. Like earlier this week, when everybody was suddenly making a big deal over Montenegro. I knew it was one of the pieces of what had once been Yugoslavia, but I wanted a better fix on it than that. 
Loved those! I still have a big roll of USGS 7.5" quad maps left over from my caving days.
For some fun hours “computer traveling” go to the nearest “confluence” to where you are (mine, for example, is at DCP: (visit #2))
and follow the east-west or north-south points on the little “compass” in the upper left corner of the screen to go as far as you like on the same latitude (or longitude) all around the globe.
You’ll learn some amazing stuff! I guarantee!
I posted a thread on this topic some time ago. I’ll look for the thread(s). Back soon…
I loved maps as a kid and we even made up a game using them. We would pore over a state map in the Rand McNally and find some obscure name and the others would have to find it. Believe me, that is hard!
I use maps nearly every day as a historian. My desk is filled with maps of the area and old phone directories. And every online map reference I can find. One of my hobbies is locating and identifying vintage aerial photos for which the guide maps of the airplane’s route have been lost. It is quite a challenge but I have developed a system.
https://vintageaerial.com/ I’m mixdenny on that site also and you can see how my searches have done.
I never use a GPS. I don’t like the way they lead you step by step without the overall picture. I prefer to use Google maps, and write down a few turns if needed. By looking top down at the trip I have a good idea of where I am going and what direction I am facing on each road.
And blueprints! A blueprint is just a map of a building. I can picture myself walking down each hallway, where the rooms are, what will be outside each room.
Dennis
Oh, man. I had no idea that I have been within 1 km of this confluence: 14°N 121°E, which is on an active volcano. It is, in fact, on an island in a lake on an island within which there is a lake with another island in it. An island on a lake on an island in a lake on an island in the Pacific Ocean.
Love maps! Got a big 'ol box of them, and I pore over them when I get restless. Which is often.
Still looking for that/those thread(s) but if the interest is there for you, look at Some geography fun... - Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS) - Straight Dope Message Board
There are a number of links there to other sources of amusement! I’ll back off on my search for more specifics, so as not to interrupt the flow of this really fun thread!
Map nerd here. As a kid, I drew my own maps of my neighborhood, including the trails we made back in the woods. I was overjoyed to learn that my grandfather had done the same thing, and still have in my possession a map he made of our neighborhood back in the late 1940’s.
Just yesterday an old friend and fellow map nerd dropped off a pile of her atlases, all from the Netherlands, all focusing on regional areas of the country at various different decades and centuries, for me to peruse. I have in the past loaned her similar map books.
Whenever I’m on line, I’ve at least one tab open to Google Maps.
This is what I came in to say. Loved the National Geographic maps.
I’ve been known to fall down the rabbit hole of Google Maps. I start out by finding out how to get somewhere that I haven’t had to drive to before and next thing I know it’s an hour later and I’m looking at some small town in Canada.
I used to love those red street map books. Did anyone else have them? This would have been in the 80s and 90s. They were issued generally by county, but I always felt special because our city was in both our county’s book and the book for the next county over.
If you were plotting a route you had to turn pages to get to the next part of the grid and I was bound and determined to draw a map that was our whole city on one page. I was fairly young when I tried to do it so I could never get the scale right and would run out of room on the paper anyway.
You haven’t experienced maps until you’ve used Google Earth in virtual reality. I use my Oculus Rift more for zooming around the world than playing games. If you see an interesting place you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in until you’re ACTUALLY STANDING THERE in that place.
Big fan of all kinds of maps. I’ve got major collection of AAA and visitor center maps from all the places I driven.
I’m sure some of used to grab a map and drive from place to place without using GPS or Waze or whatever. It wasn’t that hard. Physical maps work just fine for me, all I need to use one is some reading glasses. I prefer having a map at the ready when I’m on roadtrips.
Yeah, the one for my county is sitting just a few feet away from me. Probably got it soon after we moved here in 1998. It’s still perfectly usable, unless you live in one of the new developments that have been built since then.
I sure did. I think my initial interest was sparked from watching sports. How come it’s sunny in Los Angeles while it’s snowing here in Ohio? So, it was interesting to discover all the cities that I’d heard of by watching and reading about sports. That extended further once the Olympics rolled around as I began to discover other countries.
A little. As I grew up in different stages I’d get interested in maps for a while, learning a bit about mapping, measurements, navigation and surveying, but not enough to obsess on it the way I did with other subjects. Mapping is technology which generally interests me but it wasn’t really one of those things that hooked me. I did work for a while with a woman who was an academic expert on maps as was her more noted husband but she wasn’t much of a conversationalist on the subject.
I love maps so much I would marry one if I could. 
And yeah, I still go nuts over maps-- as much or more so than when I was a kid. Especially now that you can get a satellite view on Google Maps.
I’m fascinated by maps but I don’t read them very effectively because my spatial processing is weak. But that just means I sit slack-jawed over them for an extra long time, because I still love the information, and sort of just the fact that the information exists - or some feeling like that.
I especially love ancient maps that show how much or how little the mapmaker knew of the world. It’s interesting to follow the accuracy of the Americas over the centuries.