You can't Google an experience

An obvious fact, but one that I noticed today and appreciated: No matter how much I Google-Map my trip to Greenville, Maine, it can never tell me just what's in store. This place I'm going to, Erin and I, is up in the heart of Maine's "100-Mile Wilderness," and once the pink highlighter line zags off I-95, it seems to be nothing more than a squiggle on the screen, and no computer, no Web site, no "Widget" can make it more. I'm going to hold on to this thought with admiration and relief. Google can't steal the road trip from us, no matter how many different angle and zoom features its Earth application achieves. The road is there, always a mystery, until we roll down it. Yeah sure, people can videotape and take pictures and journal things like that, but those media don't worry me. They are pigeonholed views, personalized and colored by the individual's experience. (Which usually makes me even more curious about what my own experience could be, such as my reading of Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar--if I did that trip today, 30 years after he did it, from my own point of view, the trip would be entirely different. So, I think, of course, that the world does in fact need one more experience, one more travelogue, because mine would be just as unique and powerful as anyone's!). No, I am just glad that Google can't take that away from us: our perspective. If such a tool were available--one that would only require you to type a Start location and a Destination into two little boxes, hit Enter, and Voila! suddenly whisk you down all the country roads, from a car-window view, wind blowing in your hair, the faint scent of cow manure tickling your nose--I'll admit, I would lose no time in giving into the temptation to sit at my computer and type and click my way around the world all day. I've even felt that urge now, the urge to complain and to call for further advancements in Google technology, that why isn't this possible yet? We are in the digital age or the information age or whatever you call it, and we still have so far to go! And then I caught myself; I laughed. I told myself, this is exactly why you need to go hang out in the woods this weekend, because you are forgetting things. You're getting distracted, carried away, oversaturated with blogdom and Flickr accounts. There can be too much of these things, and I've started to cross that threshold. So today, in just a few hours, I will soon be rolling down that window, and letting all those cyber strangleholds on my brain fly off in the breeze. The woods, my dear. I can't wait to see you again.