Good to keep hold of a map in case Siri gets you turned around

I’ve been to a lot of places but I’ve never been in Cahoots. Apparently you can’t go alone, you have to be in Cahoots with someone.

I’ve also never been in Cognito either. I hear no one recognizes you there. I have been in Sane. They don’t have an airport, you have to be driven there. I have made several trips.

I know, I know, that’s an old Facebook groaner there but it describes just about how lost folks get these days without a map.

I had a good friend drift through the Chamber office on another mission asking why we didn’t have any state maps. I told him that the New Mexico Department of Transportation had quit printing them. At least that’s what they told us several years ago. Everyone now has Siri, Google Maps or Alexa to help them navigate so they don’t need a road map.

My friend said he didn’t have a cell phone or navigation. I told him it was a good column topic, however and thanked him. In the meantime, while preparing this column I checked the NMDOT online map offerings and found out that apparently they will send you one, so I applied. If it comes in I’ll give it to my friend Gene and order more.

In olden days, you kids won’t believe this, we all kept several state maps and maybe a regional map folded up in the glove compartment of the car. We even carried our gloves in there back then too. We got those maps, usually free at gas stations or chambers of commerce. They would usually get you wherever you wanted to go but refolding the map was something akin to working the Rubik’s cube and often accidents were caused when the passenger got the thing up in the driver’s sightlines.

I guess the exception to maps getting people where they were going was my mother-in-law’s infamous flub of navigating the family station wagon the wrong way in a blizzard in northern New Mexico and finally into a ditch. My smooth-talking father-in-law got a tow from a snowplow driver with instructions not to hook a chain to tourists, by convincing him that he knew Governor Bruce King.

I’ve mostly had good luck with using navigation systems but they have let me down from time to time and the ones on your phone are worthless when you lose cell service — just when you really need a good map.

At times things just don’t make sense to old Siri and she’ll double down and keep leading you further and further off course the more you try.

I do still have maps in most of the cars just in case I get a little turned around.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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