Modern consumer capitalism purports to provide the 21^st century person with an array of choice in all manner of areas. However, melding choice with competition actually results in something called ‘choice paralysis’. For sure, monopolies do exist. But in many areas of our lives it is not a monopoly that constrains us, but the time it requires to select a single product from the bountiful shelves of plenty.

Of course, at this point we should acknowledge that for many global inhabitants choices are severely restricted by economic inequality, culture and circumstance. All the more galling then when we allegedly fortunate ones are confronted by a proliferation of spurious alternatives, requiring us to engage our intellectual energies in unnecessary activity. All those resources expended on producing 50 different types of tins of bean when for most people, beans are beans are beans.

In actual fact, Rose and I have somewhat limited intellectual energies. At our age, we much prefer to receive that which will sustain us with very little thought on our part. If it does the job, let’s leave it there. Give me a tin of beans and be done with it.

So, what has all this got to do with maps? Well, it appears that since we took possession of ‘The Garmin’, the field of online navigation has become rather congested. Navigation apps on handheld screens are now ubiquitous. Multiple companies provide opportunities for us to gawp at the way a little blue dot seems to be pointing us in unwanted directions over indeterminate terrain. Provided your phone batteries keep hanging in there.

Why not just use ‘The Garmin’ and be done with it? Good question. Sure, who wouldn’t want to pack their knapsack with a house brick? Granted it has a nice big battery, hence the weight. But it also needs a special charger and special spectacles (its screen is tiny). The Garmin system is great for planning walks on a computer, but you do not actually need ‘The Garmin’ to follow these routes. So, our routes remain in the virtual world and ‘The Garmin’ in the desk drawer.

When Rose first pitched the idea of a walk in the Deutsch woods, he found our wander on an app called Komoot. Using Komoot you can discover crowd sourced wanders completely for free. Rose loves this concept. However, like most similar products, Komoot sucks you into the world of ‘in-app purchases’. In the free version, the maps are basic, and you cannot use the app to actually navigate. Even buying a one-off reasonably priced total world map pushes you further to annual navigation subscriptions and other unnecessary accoutrements. Nonetheless, with a route and the online map you can use Komoot to wander. Hello little blue dot.

As observant readers will note, we have in fact purchased a real-life Kompass paper map with folds and a waterproof cover. A map that will flutter in the breeze and blow away in a gale. Goodbye little blue dot. 

However, the good people at the Kompass Karten Company have responded to competition from the online navigation and map providers by replicating their paper maps online themselves. Their maps come with a QR code that once scanned uploads your purchase into their own app. You can even import routes from elsewhere and overlay them on their online map. Welcome back little blue dot!

Enter ‘Pocket Earth’, an app recommended by a travel agency for their self-guided walking holidays. It does the same as the others, is free, and allows us to download our routes (thanks Garmin and Komoot). The embedded map is quite good too. This one has a little blue arrow!

And of course, we have omitted to mention the granddaddy of them all – Google Maps. Renowned for taking east European lorry drivers and unwary holiday makers up impassable alleys and one-way streets, it is nonetheless helpful on a macro scale. Rose and I are, nonetheless, somewhat nervous about being told to jump off 200m high cliffs by the good people at google as a means to shorten a 50m path detour. Plus, you cannot upload a .gpx file to google maps.

Ahh – the .gpx file, the currency of modern navigation. Readable by almost all navigation and mapping apps, we have copied, constructed and liberally dispersed our own .gpx files all over the various mapping products described above. Here it is! We now find ourselves in the (un)enviable position of being able to flip from app to app, from little blue dot to arrow, from blurred to detailed online maps. 

We can even unfold our paper version, should we wish to go all retro.

It seems to us, therefore, that most of our wander will be spent peering at our phone screens to see how close our various blue signs are to our intended route. We can imagine heated conversations extolling the accuracy of Komoot, Kompass and Pocket Earth. We may even part company and follow our own preferred pathing app, swapping navigation notes at the end of our days wanders. 

Or we can stick together, follow the signposts and look at the scenery.

Or….More Vorfreude and less Schadenfreude

Rose recently alerted us to a new concept coming out of the world of psychology, an area of life of which we are both not unaware, if also somewhat cynical of. Rather wonderfully, given the destination of our upcoming wander, the term he introduced into our shared lexicon was a German term ‘Vorfreude‘ or ‘the anticipation of joy’.

Apparently, winding ourselves up into a frenzy of expectation regarding our Black Forest adventure is actually of great benefit to our mental health. There is certainly no doubt about it, we are both in a state of increasing vorfreude as our start date looms. Personally, I am so vorfreuden I am fit to burst, or as the Germans would put it: sehrvielenvorfreudenburstmachen. (Put it in google translate, the word actually works).

According to one of the experts quoted in the Gurniad article discovered by Rose, people often feel joy and excitement when planning a trip, thinking about going on a date or anticipating a special meal. Well all those things are true of us. Although Rose is not the most eagerly anticipated date night companion, as well as the trip I shall be discovering the joy of turning 65 during our wander, and Rose has promised me a special Geburtstagsessen. So two out of three ain’t bad.

Apparently, looking forward to something increases the pleasure of the event itself. So we are actually having two wanders: one imaginary, the other real. The article lists 30 ‘zero-effort’ ways to fill our lives with joy. Not so sure about the zero effort bit though. We recently had a look at the gradients on our forthcoming wander….and the gym is far from the zero effort recommended by the Gurniad. Nonetheless, pouring over maps, tracing routes in highlighter pen and imagining experiencing the multiple wellness treats provided by the Black Forest hotels seems to fit the bill nicely. Very sehrvielenvorfreudenburstmachenwellness.

Among the other vorfreuden tricks listed we will most certainly engage in are savouring the moment (check), treating ourselves (check), scheduling movement (very much a check), looking for natural wonders (check), throwing a party (check, see earlier comment regarding Geburtstagsessen) and enjoying getting ready for bed (check, post wander exhaustion really helps here). There are a few duds though including meal planning, a daily poem and going to the library, none of which seem to fit into our rugged wander existence.

However, FUTURE ALERT, ‘putting plans in writing’ and ‘keeping a joy journal’ are right up there, despite worries about potential joy journal messiness. We have been much taken with recent Facebook postings by friends @DouglasThompson and @PaulWheble on their respective wanders. We will be doing similar. Please follow @WanderingMan for daily posts on the wander and delve into our very own daily Joy Journal, or as the Germans would say, “sehrvielenvorfreudenburstmachentäglichjoyjournal“.

As regular readers of these think pieces will know, our wanders can sometimes head off on unexpected paths. Hardly surprising, in that on two occasions we have actually set off ‘sans maps’. In Nepal, we even arrived back at our start point to buy a map and guidebook to read on the flight home. You know, so we could see where we had been.

Some basic insights seem well overdue. For example, that maps are designed to guide your way. That they include information on roads, paths, buildings, contours and so on. Amazingly, maps are orientated north/south, allowing the map reader to position themselves with reference to where the sun rises and sets. You cannot get lost with a map. Can you?

In 2017, we took possession of a failsafe electronic navigation device, the Garmin. Weighing slightly less than a standard house brick, plus auxiliary battery pack, the Garmin doubled our Nepalese backpack tonnage. Furthermore, the electronic map we installed was woefully inadequate. Nepal does not possess (or at least the Garmin version of Nepal) a serious set of Ordnance Survey maps. It got us out of trouble just the once. The map we bought in Kathmandu on the way home was much better and lighter, even if somewhat late for our purposes.

But this time, we are heading off to one of the most developed countries in the world. Surely, mapping would have been brought to the very peak of sophistication by the methodologically minded germans. We went looking.

Indeed, our proposition is true. Germany has a network of fabulous maps. But (there is always one of those, isn’t there), identifying the correct map, and then finding somewhere to sell one to you is quite another thing altogether. Stanfords Map Shop in London didn’t list one remotely likely option. Another UK shop looked more hopeful. The dilemma was less identification than selection. There was no way to figure out which map we needed. So, we took a punt and ordered what we thought was the right one.

Sadly, a miss. Perhaps more of a maybe than a miss, but definitely not a hit. If we had been walking a few miles to the west it would have been ideal. But we were not, and it was not. Happily, a wonderful French company came good, and we ordered the next easterly version of the Kompass Map series and hit the bullseye. Baiersbronn, our start and finish point, sat squarely in the middle of our new purchase.

So now, like an expert carpenter, we had the right tool. A lightweight, accurate and relevant means to find our way around the Black Forest. What could go wrong? What indeed.

To be continued……