Counties and Interstates
Last week, I posted the very popular Ohio is a Piano wherein Andy Woodruff at Cartogrammar mentioned his Counties Visited Map. Andy has noted every county in the United States that he has visited during his travels. I also know that Michael5000 has been recording his counties. Not to be outdone, I created my own:
Click on map for larger view.
I suppose each county recorder can use his or her own criteria, but I counted any county in which I have set foot, whether it was me driving, me as a passenger, or even got off a plane in an airport. Thus, any of the isolated green spots you see above were trips by air to places like Salt Lake City and Boston, with the exception of Niagara Falls, NY, by way of Ontario.
Unfortunately, I did mine the hard way... I took a blank county map and filled it in county by county with Windows Paint. It wasn't until I started preparing this post that I realized that Andy used a really cool tool at Counties.Visitedmap.com. The site creates your maps and keeps statistics for you. I may have to explore this further.
But wait! That's not all!
Last week, I also shared with you the Interstate Highway System as Transit Map and I wondered, how would my travels on the Interstate Highway System appear on that map. Here you go... another 40 minutes of my life I will never get back (but hey, you're reading this, so don't talk):
UPDATE: For those of you interested in collecting counties, Andy has provided some addional useful links:
The Extra Miler Club
Why do you think they call them counties?
UPDATE 8/14: I redid my counties visited map using the Counties.VisitedMap.com mentioned above. This is the one I'll keep up to date:
Labels: highways, united states
posted by Cartophiliac @ Tuesday, August 11, 2009
5 Comments
5 Comments:
Oh, well done my man! I envy you your relatively rich field of county-grabbing opportunities. Since I live (1) in a corner and (2) in the large-county half of the country, and (3) since I've been playing this game for a lot of years, I don't have any new counties within 300 miles. Whereas you could go for a Sunday drive in Kentucky and harvest counties like they were wheatstalks.
Yes, but I also must give extra credit to your County Clerk project, as it is hand drawn. Even more work than my click and fill...
Oooh, the interstate map is a good idea! On an ordinary map it'd look much the same as the county map, but using the "transit" map makes it more fun. Be careful collecting counties if you're traveling with anyone who's not into it, though. It makes them angry.
Couple of links of interest:
http://mob-rule.com/counties
http://www.extramilerclub.org
"Whereas you could go for a Sunday drive in Kentucky and harvest counties like they were wheatstalks."
Of course, that would mean intentionally spending a day in Kentucky, instead of just passing through...
Oh, I've got click-and-fill maps too. Also, a notebook full of state-level maps. But it doesn't feel as labor-intensive when you fill it in one county at a time over a couple decades.
At least, you should take a few weekends and complete Ohio! Ohio's a big-time county state, so it would be quite an accomplishment, and give you serious home-state cred.
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