Making life a holiday with interesting vacation and adventure ideas.

The Ordnance Survey Outdoors Show opens its doors again Friday 14th March to Sunday 16th March 2008 at the NEC, Birmingham, UK.

There will be plenty of activities on offer. You can get a taster dive session, scale a wall of ice, tackle high ropes and try out a mountain bike on a dirt track. Then you can listen to first-hand accounts of the travels of famous adventurers and learn how to explore the world yourself. There will be the usual map-reading tutorials and also the opportunity to learn about surviving in the wild.

Labels: 2008, activities, adventure, exhibition, map, NEC, outdoors, travel, UK

The UK's local independent television network, ITV Local, has just launched a terrific resource for the independent traveller in the UK.

ITV Local: Travel News provides real-time traffic and travel news for England, Wales and the Scottish Borders. It has easy to use, live interactive traffic maps, road traffic cameras from the Highways Agency and Transport for London, plus rail, tube, air and sea alerts.

Labels: map, news, travel, UK, Webcams

Further to Thursday's post updating my list of webcams around the world, here is a great mashup that gives a visual impression of daybreak moving across our globe.

DaylightMap is a fun site, displaying the pattern of night and day on a Google map, for any area of the Earth, date and time. You can see at a glance where it is daytime and also get a good indication of any location's current local time, sunrise and sunset times, together with its length of day.

They are already starting to gather for the New Year's eve celebrations in Australia; half a million people are expected to be partying in a hot Melbourne.

Labels: daylight, Google, map, mashup, Time, World

This, my blogging buddies, is the 500th post in Tales from here and there about this and that; the blog is a few years old now because back in the early days, we didn't post every day. Given the themes reflected in this blog, such as adventure, travel and art, it is fitting that we should draw your attention in our 500th post to the 500th anniversary of the publication of the first map known to show the whole earth.

The remarkable map is the work of German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, in 1507 and was designed to be cut out and pasted onto a sphere. Much is made of the map because it is believed to be the first document that names America, be it South America, and both North and South America are depicted as land masses separate from Asia. Consider also, that the map was drawn using data obtained from sailors and explorers, and in those days travel really was an adventure activity. More.

You can see the Waldseemüller Globe Gores Map at the University of Minnesota, T.R. Anderson Gallery, in the James Ford Bell Library, where it is the central feature in an anniversary exhibition celebrating 'The Map that Named America, 1507-2007', which runs through to December 31, 2007.

Labels: 500, America, blog, map, Oldest Map, U.S.A., University of Minnesota, Waldseemueller Globe Gores Map

With the current interest in geo-positioning systems, it is interesting to reflect that people have needed to know their whereabouts and the location of different places, since the earliest times. The need to record this information and communicate it to others, has led to the development of maps; the history of which, has been summarised in a fascinating article by Angus W. Stocking of Colorado, USA.

He points out that maps do not necessarily have to be pictorial and that for generations, the Dreamtime songs of the Australian Aborigines have enabled them to travel vast distances through arid land. The system ticks all the boxes and the Aboriginal navigation skills are legendary, they never get lost, so possibly their songs should have the title of the World's Oldest Map.

Labels: Australia, map, Oldest Map, World

Another Mashup that might interest the more paranoid adventurer. This one maps disease outbreaks around the world with data from organizations such as the International Society for Infectious Diseases, the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

This is certainly a site that should carry a health warning for hypochondriacs but it is great for travel professionals who want to impress their colleagues by dropping a comment during social chat; "Four cases of human anthrax were found recently in Mongolia" or "Hantavirus infections have increased considerably in Germany since the beginning of the year".

The site is a mine of information about all sorts of viruses and bacterium that most of us don't get to hear about; look up 'humans infected with Cowpox after contact with cats'. However, thankfully most of us will never come across these nasties on our travels. No, I didn't mean cats! Happy traveling.

Labels: health, map, warning, World

Jaunted.com drew my attention to an interesting Google-map mashup, displaying global terrorism and other suspicious events around the world. As noted in the Jaunted post, the continually updated map is quite addictive and not recommended for anyone suffering from paranoia.

There is however, an interesting conglomeration of events in the U.S.A., which has a visibly greater density of activity than anywhere else in the world. Worryingly, since the map is only concerned with terrorist-type incidents, the 85 people shot dead each day in the U.S and more than twice that number who suffer from gun injuries, are not usually counted. Measured against that statistic, travel to the so called 'trouble spots', might not be considered so hazardous.

Labels: Global Incident Map, map, terrorist attack