The graffiti on the bridge in front of us is colorful but not exactly the cultural experience I was hoping to give my kids. We鈥檝e been cruising the streets on the edge of Macon, Georgia, looking for a collection of Native American mounds, but so far聽all we鈥檝e found is liquor stores and some randy messages spray-painted on an overpass. We are lost.
It鈥檚 an odd feeling and an increasingly uncommon one;聽given the GPS devices in our pockets, it鈥檚 pretty damn hard to make a wrong turn. Unless, that is, you decide to ditch the GPS entirely and let your two 12-year-olds choose the route for the family road trip using an old-school atlas.
A week before we arrived in Macon, I聽bought a Rand McNally and told my kids they would聽navigate our spring-break journey. We鈥檇 be traveling from our home聽in Atlanta聽to , a barrier island six hours and 300 miles southeast聽on the coast of South Carolina, where we鈥檇 spend a few days camping and paddleboarding. I set the atlas in front of them on the kitchen table and explained what it was. Then I circled our starting point and destination on the map and asked them to plot our course. I may as well have given them an abacus and asked them to do algebra. It didn鈥檛 help that they can barely agree on the color of the sky.
Call this an experiment in GPS detox. I鈥檓 as guilty as anyone when it comes to relying too heavily on my devices to tell me where to go. I subscribe to and OnX聽and use my phone to find Chinese food when I鈥檓 hungry; I always know where I am in the woods and the location of the nearest egg roll. But I don鈥檛 really know how to get anywhere on my own anymore. I just drift through the landscape on autopilot, turning wherever the nice lady in my phone tells me to turn. As a result, I鈥檝e lost my sense of place, and I鈥檓 oblivious to the landscape around me. 鈥淵ou can feel completely disconnected and lost in space using GPS,鈥 says Dave Imus, a cartographer that focus on the ridges, valleys, and rivers that define a region instead of its town names and interstate exits.
If it鈥檚 gotten this bad for me, I鈥檓 even more worried about my kids, Cooper and Addisson, who could grow up without ever using a paper map鈥攚hich feels like bad parenting on my part. Hence the spring-break road-trip experiment. 鈥淧lease don鈥檛 turn our beach vacation into a lesson,鈥 my daughter pleaded. She might be sassy, but she鈥檚 not wrong. The beach trip is totally going to be a lesson.
First聽we have to get out of Atlanta, which聽on the map聽looks like a snake鈥檚 nest of highways. The blue circle of an interstate wraps around the whole聽city, so in theory, you could take a wrong turn and do laps until you run out of gas. But my son figures out that I-75 cuts through Atlanta, so if we keep heading south, we鈥檒l eventually get past the mayhem.
I thought we鈥檇 fumble around a series of back roads until we ran out of gas or I started crying, but instead we actually all had fun.
The kids pore over the atlas in the back seat, getting a kick out of finding town names that are dangerously close to being dirty words, like Bullocks and Blichton. They also think it鈥檚 cool that the border of Georgia and South Carolina is defined by the Savannah River, not just some arbitrary line drawn in the sand, and that the coast of both states is聽painted with a lot of green because of an abundance of wildlife refuges there.
Middle Georgia is mostly flat, hot, and full of pecan trees. But I鈥檓 determined to give the kids a sense of聽the landscape we鈥檙e traveling through, so I ask them to look for cool detours, like patches of green or blue on the map indicating parks or rivers and lakes. They trace I-75 through the state and contemplate different places we could check out鈥擮conee National Forest, High Falls State Park鈥攂ut settle on , a collection of Native American earth mounds just outside Macon.
Navigating the surface roads to the park doesn鈥檛 go smoothly. I lose count of the number of U-turns I make, and we end up sitting in the parking lot of a sketchy liquor store while the kids argue. But I refuse to pull out my phone. If we drive into a river, it鈥檚 going to be at the hands of my children. Eventually, they guide us to the park, which is worth the trouble. We walk to the top of the聽, a ceremonial 55-foot-tall clay hump that archeologists estimate took ten聽million baskets of dirt to create. It鈥檚 the highlight of the road trip.
A couple of hours later (call it two and a half, due to聽some confusion around which direction we should go off the exit),聽we make it to the coast. There鈥檚 not enough detail on the atlas for the kids to comprehend the sheer volume of islands that litter the edge of South Carolina, so we use one of those cartoonish tourist maps of the area to navigate our way across a string of inlets and聽islets聽to Hunting Island State Park. Once we arrive at our campsite, the kids take advantage of their newfound navigational power and use the map to direct us to ice cream shops and a waterfront park with big oaks covered in Spanish moss.
I鈥檓 not gonna lie and say we took the most efficient route. We didn鈥檛. But my kids got us to the beach. I thought we鈥檇 fumble around a series of back聽roads until we ran out of gas or I started crying, but instead we actually all had fun.
A good lesson never ends, so now that we鈥檙e back home, I keep quizzing them on directions. I鈥檒l pull over into a random parking lot and ask them how to get to our house. I鈥檒l bring out the atlas and have them look for cool parks we should explore. I ask them where a certain river eventually leads to and which direction we should walk to reach a ridge of mountains on the horizon. They get annoyed with me, because they鈥檙e 12, but they鈥檙e learning their way around their corner of the world.