According to several sites (Days of the Year, National Day Calendar, Time and Date, There Is a Day for That), today, April 5, is National Read a Road Map Day, but none of them has any information on how it started or who initiated it. No matter, I love maps of all kinds, including road maps.
My most memorable experience reading a road map came during the summer of 1976. I was living in Villa Tasso, Florida and had just finished C. W. Ruckel Junior High School, in Niceville, 10 miles away. I also had been a Junior Girl Scout during the three previous years and had "graduated" with other girls in my troop. To celebrate, we took a trip to Atlanta.
I remember there were a few cars, each loaded with girls and one chaperone driver. Somehow our driver became separated from the others as we were getting into Atlanta. Then she got lost, on the "wrong" side of town. Then she got scared. Because she was a white Southern woman, and everyone around us was Black. She started freaking out. (That's the kind of people I lived around at that time of my life; the joys of living in the Deep South.)
But we had a road map! And I was already good at reading maps. So I figured out where we were on the map and guided her to wherever we were supposed to be going, probably a hotel. (That I don't remember.) And she slowly got unfreaked out.
Knowing how to read a map is a useful skill.
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