A Tale Of Two Maps

 A day or two ago, or maybe yesterday, I blogged about Imagine Sailing Your Yacht To Fort Worth's Imaginary Panther Island.

That blogging made mention of the multiple real islands which exist in the vicinity of my old home zone of the Skagit Valley of Washington.

In that blogging I made use of the map app on my computer to properly identify actual islands which exist in the vicinity of my previous, pre-Texas, location.

Doing so, as in screen capping a map of the general area I used to exist in, I was struck by how close I was to so many things. Such as another country, known as Canada. Or, one of the world's biggest actual islands, Vancouver Island, where the picturesque capital of British Columbia, Victoria, is located.

I could, for only a few bucks, ride a ferry to multiple islands, or Victoria. Or just take a day trip to one of Washington's many tourist towns, such as La Conner, in the Skagit Valley, location of an actual iconic signature bridge built over actual water.

It was like living in a theme park.

A reality I did not appreciate when I lived there. Head west a few miles and you are at saltwater beaches. Head east a few miles and you are in a mountainous scenic wonderland. Head north a few miles and you are in a different country.

In that map above, that jagged dark line represents the border between Canada and the U.S. If you look closely you can see that my old home town of Mount Vernon is just about at the same longitude on the planet as Victoria in Canada.

If you look real close at the map you can see a part of America cut off by that borderline. That is Point Roberts. Mostly Canadians live there, but it is in America.

And now, below, let us look at a screen cap map of a similar section of the planet at my current location on the planet, Wichita Falls, Texas.

Is it in any wonder why I suffer bouts of homesickness? Which I do nothing about, because it is not an easy thing to change ones location. 

In the above instance, unlike the previous map, that squiggly thick line does not indicate the border with another country. This one indicates the Texas border with Oklahoma, with that squiggly line also known as the Red River. As you can see there are a few water features in my current vicinity. None of the size which sport ferry boats, cruise ships or yachts.

I really do need to change my current location...