[Terr_]

> I do benefit from Google maps in learning my way around a place.

Tangent: I once got into a discussion with a friend who was surprised I had the map (on a car dashboard display) locked to North-is-up instead of relative to the car's direction of travel.

I agreed that it's less-convenient for relative turn decisions, but rationalized that setting as making it easier to learn the route's correspondence to the map, and where it passed relative to other landmarks beyond visual sight. (The issue of knowing whether the upcoming turn was left-or-right was addressed by the audio guidance portion.)

[harpiaharpyja]

It's neat to hear that I'm not the only one who does this. It makes a night-and-day difference for me.

When the map is locked north, I'm always aware of my location within the larger area, even when driving somewhere completely new.

Without it, I could never develop any associations between what I'm seeing outside the windshield and a geospatial location unless I was already familiar with the area.