California Maps

Archive for July, 2009

There are many tourists who decide to come to beautiful California every year. What is interesting, though, is that there seems to be a hierarchy of cities that puts L.A. and San Francisco at the top of the desired-destinations list, leaving the rest of beautiful California by the wayside. On the one hand, this is unfortunate because the rest of California is sunny too, but, on the other hand, this hierarchy leaves other, less popular cities better able to be explored by tourists.

For example, there are special deals that are frequently offered for San Diego hotels, because travelers are looking for accommodations less often in this city than in other areas of California. This means that the lodgings often lower their prices here in the less-frequently visited cities.

Even if you live on the East Coast and have never been to California, the Internet brings vacation planning right into your home via your computer. It is possible, and in most cases even cheaper, to plan your vacation online through a travel website than it is to visit an agency or to directly call hotels that you have found in a guide book that was written five years ago. In most cases, booking your accommodations and other travel plans online means getting better rates. Prices are almost always lower via the Internet regardless of what city you are traveling to, and when you are looking for accommodations in less-frequently visited cities, the budget prices go lower and lower.

Of course, price is not the only factor when it comes to choosing San Diego hotels. Customers should get as much information as possible about each accommodation through the Internet so that they can decide which place is perfect for their needs. The best travel websites are ones that keep a rich amount of information about each lodging on their website. In addition to the price of a room and the address of the place, you should be able to find an abundance of information ranging from area attractions to the features of the hotel. It is only when all of this information is available that each traveler can choose the location that best suits their unique travel needs.

San Diego hotels near the famous zoo are some of the most popular in the region. Families traveling with children may want to check out the accommodations listings that are near the zoo in order to minimize travel time to and from the zoo. Parents traveling with small children know just how long an hour in the car, sitting in traffic, can seem!

If you are looking for accommodations that are close to a certain attraction, you can often find establishments that are close to those locations by searching online. If the travel website does not give you the information of distance to landmark, you can simply use a mapping website to plot the estimated time and route between each of the establishments you are considering and the attractions of your choice. In this way, every traveler can find accommodations that are in ideal locations.

Essen Travel offers search filters that help refine your search and quickly locate the best room you can afford at http://www.essentravel.com. Take advantage of lowered prices at many San Diego hotels and find all of the travel information you need.

By: Iprwire Staff Writer

If you are carrying around a few (I use that term loosely) extra pounds like most of us are, you all know all the reasons why we should take the weight off. It will reduce stress on our heart, reducing the chance of heart disease, cancer, possibility of diabetes; feel better, look more attractive, etc.

There are 101 reasons why, but it can be a real pain to finally get that weight off. You push really hard, make a little progress, get side tracked, and bam you are heavier then you started.

It’s maddening. Enough with that hassle, I have put together 5 simple steps to actually losing weight and keeping it off. These steps can be applied to anything, but we are focusing on weight loss here.

1. Know What You Want

2. Know Where You Are

3. Track Your Results

4. Make Course Corrections

5. Being held Accountable

Now all your extra weight will effortlessly melt off. Yeah right! A simple list of 5 items is not going to do it, so let me explain the intricacies of the 5 items and where the hang up normally occurs when applied to losing weight.

1. Know What You Want

This one is dead simple. Most people that want to lose weight have an idea of how many pounds they would like to lose or how they would like their body to look.

I think we can safely say if your body started looking the way you wanted it, you would know, even if you didn’t have it completely mapped out and detailed.

2. Know Where You Are

This is the big trip up. It is almost always overlooked and is the number one reason for the up and down Yo Yo effect we experience with losing weight. We are unhappy with how our body feels and how it looks and it is painful to zoom in and get an accurate picture of where we are. Unfortunately, we have to know where we are, to be able to accurately judge the results we are getting.

You are on a trip to San Diego, California. You would like to start your trip from Phoenix, Arizona, but you really don’t know where you are. No problem. You get an Arizona/California map and find that a simple 6 hours trip west on interstate 8 will get you to San Diego.

6 hours later, you have no clue where you are and it is definitely not warm San Diego. You feel defeated and you want to give up! Do you blame the car? The stupid maps? San Diego? Yourself?

Now what if I told you, you were actually in New Your City, not Phoenix, Arizona. A 6 hour car ride west from New York City will never get you to San Diego.

If you took the time to accurately find out where you were, you would have been able to choose the appropriate means to get to San Diego and have an expectation as to how long it would take.

This is the same with weight loss and our personal physical condition. In our minds, we think we are starting in a different physical condition then we really are. When the results don’t follow the illusion in your mind, we get upset.

3. Track Your Results

This is conceptually simple. If we have no clue as to WHAT we are doing, how do we know what is working? It might be a simple to do, but is also simple not to do. In the end, most people never track their results.

4. Make Course Corrections

We love to do this one. We have it hands down. It is like step 1 of knowing what you want. We try the new food diet, the super sit up machine, and the cardio hip hop power energy yoga fat burner class.

We might be great at switching it up, but without knowing where we are starting from and a history of tracked results, we have no clue as to what we should change or even which direction we should go.

5. Being held Accountable

No, not accountability! That is an evil word. I don’t want someone to know what I am doing, or more importantly what I am not doing.

So, why do we resist accountability, your secret weapon to weight loss? Because it works! If you know someone is going to be watching, you would follow through or at least feel very uncomfortable not following through.

Accountability when used wisely is the ultimate turbo booster to your weight loss. Since you are going to be accountable anyway, you might as well get something out of it.

Using accountability up front, you can achieve the body of your dreams. If you let your body hold you accountable, it will throw on fat in places you don’t want it to be.

The biggest obstacle to weight loss is not taking any action. It doesn’t matter how good the plan is, it is worthless if you don’t follow it. So what do I do now?

First and foremost get Accountable.

Forward this article to someone you respect and care about and tell them I want to be accountable to finally taking off my extra pounds. When they agree to support you, start working through Steps 1 through 5.

By: Kimberly Thomas

The idea of a great inland sea occupying a vast part of the American west and opening into the Pacific attained the height of its popularity in the middle part of the 18th century under the patronage of the influential French cartographers Guillaume de l’Isle and Phillipe Buache. Under Buache and De l’Isle’s influence the Sea of the West, Mer de L’Ouest, or Baye de l’Ouest reached its fullest expression and commonly appeared on maps from about 1740 to 1790.

The source of Sea of the West, however, precedes both Buache and De l’Isle by several hundred years. The idea of a Sea of the West is intimately related to the hope of either a Northwest Passage or a River passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Such a passage was actively sought after almost from the earliest days of American Exploration. The idea had at its core the commercial interests of British and French traders who, unlike the Spanish, had no easy access to the Pacific and the rich trade with Asia.



Munster’s iconic 1841 Map of America. Verrazano’s Sea is seen extending from the north towards Carolina.

In it most embryonic form, the Sea of the West can be associated with Verrazano’s sea. This great sea, pictured here in Munster’s classic 1540 map of the Americas, was identified by the Italian navigator Verrazano. Sailing along North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 1524, Verrazano saw the sound on the eastern side of the isthmus and postulated that it must be the Pacific.

. . . where was found an isthmus a mile in width and about 200 long, in which, from the ship, was seen the oriental sea between the west and north. Which is the one, without doubt, which goes about the extremity of India, China and Cathay. We navigated along the said isthmus with the continual hope of finding some strait or true promontory at which the land would end toward the north in order to be able to penetrate to those blessed shores of Cathay …

This concept was taken up by various cartographers back in Europe and, subsequently, a great indentation along the western coast of America starting just north of California was a common characteristic of many early maps of the continent. Even in the 1670s, when John Lederer made his famous explorations of Virginia and North Carolina, most colonial settlers believed that the western sea was only about 10 or 15 days inland from the coast.

Nonetheless, Verrazano’s Sea was largely discredited in the late 18th century when prominent cartographers like Ortelius, Mercator, Hondius, and Blaeu removed it from their maps. It was not until the 17th century that it began to reappear on maps though reformatted to a reduced size and moved farther west.



Jansson’s 1631 Map of America showing a mysterious inlet…

The next serious first hand evidence of the Sea of the West appears in the account of Juan de Fuca’s voyage along the western coast of America published by Samuel Purchas in his 1625 book Purchas His Pilgrimes. The veracity of de Fuca’s account has been the subject of significant debate over the last 100 years or so. Most argue that de Fuca’s account was fabricated by the Englishman Michael Lok to promote his own ideas of a Northwest Passage. However, we find a grain of truth in the narrative. De Fuca was supposedly a Greek Captain active in the Americas in the late 1500s. Colonial records to indicate that such a figure did in fact exist and was an active pilot in New Spain from about 1585 to 1600. De Fuca’s account does ring somewhat of truth if we assume that he actually sailed into the strait now named after him:

…until he came to the Latitude of fortie seven degrees, and that there finding that the land trended North and north-east with a broad inlet of sea, between 47 and 48 degrees of Latitude; he entered thereinto, sayling therein more than twenty days, and found that Land trending sometime North-west and North-east, and North, and also East and South-eastward, and very much broader Sea than was at the said entrance, and that he passed by divers lands in that sayling…

Regardless of any actual veracity De Fuca’s account may or may not have, what is important for our purposes is the effect this report had on European cartographers who widely trusted it. In accounting for De Fuca’s 20 days of sailing, European cartographers, began mapping a large open inlet extending well into the continent – though perhaps not so far as the 16th century Verazanno’s Sea.



Janvier’s 1762 Map of North America Showing Buache’s Sea

The next incarnations of the Sea of the West – and perhaps it fullest realization – came through the work of the aforementioned Guillaume de l’Isle and his brother in law Philippe Buache. In the early 17th century it became increasingly important for French and English settlers along the northeastern coasts of North America to find a passage to the Pacific in order to compete with the Spanish for the lucrative East India trade. Both nations sent out several expeditions both by sea and by river. By this time, most agreed that an Arctic route was unfeasible and instead turned their attention to the lake and river systems of the continent. Some believed they would find a river system extending westward from the Hudson Bay along the passage mapped out by Juan de Fuca. Others postulated a more southerly route through the Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnepeg. Still others believed that a route could be found by following the Missouri River.

Such was the competition to get to the Pacific that, when De l’Isle and Buache “discovered” the Sea of the West, they chose to keep it a secret for the benefit of France and never published it in any of their works. It was left up to the competing map publisher Nolin to abscond with a copy of De l’Isle’s map and publish the first Buachian “Sea of the West” map. De l’Isle subsequently filed a law suit against Nolin for copyright infringement,

Il (Nolin) a represente une Mer a l’Occident de la Louisiane, qu’il appelle Mer de l’Ouest. Cette mer estoit une de mes decouvertes, mais comme il n’est pas toujours a propos de publier ce que l’on scait, ou que 1 ‘on croit sqavoir, je n’ai pas fait graver cette Mer sur les ouvrages quej’ai rendus publics, ne voulant pas que les Etrangers profitassent de cette decouverte quelle qu’elle pft estre, avant que l’on eut reconnu dans ce Royaume si l’on en pourroit tirer quelque avantage..

Even so, the damage was done and the Sea of the West began to appear on a number of influential maps of the period.

Of course, one wonders at De l’Isle and Buache’s sources. On this we have some certain evidence and a great deal of speculation. Reports from American Indians of a salt sea far to the west were hardly uncommon in the 18th century. De l’Isle would have had access to numerous missionary reports that were, at the time, streaming into Paris from the new world. At the very least, he would have had access to the narrative of Lahonton (who heard about the Great Salt Lake from his American Indian Guides), Juan de Fuca’s legend, the De Fonte letter, the influential though possibly fabricated tale of the American Indian traveler Moncacht-Ape, as well as the explorations of Pierre de La Verendrye.



Vaugondy’s 1772 Map of America Showing the Sea of the West

With so many sources and such a history, one might be tempted to ask why De l’Isle and Buache claim to have “discovered” the Sea of the West. The stems from the a cartographic approach embraced by Buache. Cartographers had the difficult job of piecing together legends, missionary reports, astronomical observations, and nautical references into a cohesive whole. It was their job to present the known world in a comprehensible manner. Even with reports from navigators and missionaries coming in from all over the world – much was unknown and much else was unreliable. In these instances cartographers resorted to a number of different strategies. Some filled the space with sketches, drawings, text or cartouches. Others simply left unknown areas blank. Some coped the speculations of other cartographers. By early 18th century, a new movement had evolved in France to address these problems, it was called “theoretical cartography”. Buache was the leading theoretical cartographer of his day. Theoretical cartography attempted to used known geographic patterns and scientific theories to fill in blank spaces when little else was known. The Mer de la Ouest is the perfect example Though a salt water inlet from the Pacific had long been speculated upon and hoped for, Buache and De l’Isle embraced the theory because it supported both the ambitions of the French crown in the New World and the theoretical geographic theory that Buache was developing.

The Sea of the West remained on map until the end of the 18th century. The late 18th century explorations of James Cook and George Vancouver finally defeated the theoretical cartographers.

http://www.geographicus.com

By: Kevin Brown