Trip to Las Vegas where maps were found in interesting places...

Last week I was on the road traveling to Las Vegas to present some work, network, and throw a big party at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting. Poor as I am, I wasn't able to get a direct flight out of Santa Barbara, so I had a layover in Salt Lake City. Not the most direct route...


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Interestingly, I did see a few maps at the airport in Salt Lake City. On my way to the gate, I saw an interesting store called Your Planet sporting a highly generalized map in their logo so I stop in the busy walkway to snap a photo. Surely everyone was loving my instant traffic jam.

While it looks like it could easily be part of a chain or franchise, you will only find one Your Planet store, and it's located in Terminal 2. Click the photo to jump to their website.


I was on my way to a geography conference were I was expecting to see countless maps, yet the ones in unusual places caught my eye. When I arrived at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, I headed to the airport tram to take me down to the general vicinity of ground transportation. In the rush to jump on the train with unwieldy bags in tow, I almost missed a map on the floor.


Apparently I actually did miss the best part of the map just behind me embedded in the rotunda terrazo floor. The artist is Greg Lefevre, and you can see much better images than I would have been able to take of his work on his studio website: http://www.lefevrestudios.com/

To find his "Flight Paths" McCarran Airport artwork on his studio website, click the Terrazo/Mixed Media link on his home page, and find the "Flight Paths" link on the left. If you click through the images to the "Final Floor Design", you'll notice that the photo I took above is just a small piece of the outside perimeter of the circle leading into the tram waiting area. You'll actually find quite a few cartographic art works on Lefevre's website. Perhaps he's a geographer at heart.

The last bit of map news from the road is courtesy of my generous friends at ESRI. The sixth edition of Map Use: Reading and Analysis by Jon Kimerling, Aileen Buckley, Phillip Muehrcke, and Juliana Muehrcke is finally available. I came home with a shiny-new-full-color-hard-cover-hot-off-the-presses copy, and to top it off I got it signed by my favorite cartographic researcher Aileen Buckley. Click the cover image below to jump to the ESRI Press website to take a look.

It's a fantastic resource and stunningly beautiful. If only every book about maps and analysis could be published in full color...

I walked EVERYWHERE while I was in Vegas. I really wish I had borrowed a trackstick to show a map of my zigzags back and forth. It was pretty dry and windy during the day... although you can usually find plenty of water displayed in interesting ways along The Strip.

I'm definitely happy to be home and rehydrated.