4/4/15

BIG GIRL, little girl, a car, and Marcel waves


This is as close as I can get to the prompt this week at Sepia Saturday. I'm still relegated to sorting through snapshots already on my computer. No lifting of boxes to get to the real hardcore stuff. The way things are going I'll be sitting with my foot up for another four weeks. But, enough of that nonsense.


Click on image to see it larger.

A big girl and a little girl standing next to a car, each with marcel wave hairdos. Okay, big woman and little woman to be more precise. The Sepia Saturday prompt shows two women on bicycles. Well, I've got two woman and a wheel. That'll have to do. The only thing I'm sure of is that whoever owned the car had a membership with AAA, the American Automobile Association.

I used to have a membership with the California version until I bought my last car which came with its own service for a few years. When it ran out I didn't bother to go back to AAA because of the cost. My car insurance offers me full roadside assistance for $12 a year. Why pay 40+? Well, I do admit to missing the maps. I loved the AAA maps and TripTix. I like having a paper map to find where I'm going. So many people use GPS on phones or systems in their car. I rather hate those systems. I like being able to see the whole and not the minutia. Yes, a GPS map can show me up close the road I'm on, but it really doesn't do justice in giving me scale of where I'm going. And frankly, I've seen way too many stupid directions come out of computers and smartphones. Give me an old fashioned map and I'm quite content.

I am an excellent map reader. Do I have proof for such a statement? Well, I only got lost once on a trip by myself in England and Scotland. Once. I had the Royal Auto club big map book that I'd bought in London and my little blue rental car with the crummy transmission. I drove around for a month with only getting lost for about 10 minutes in a town near Dartmoor. Actually when I think back on that crummy car I'm probably lucky it held together through the whole trip. I squeaked and rattled all over the countryside until I returned it back to London, both of us showing some wear.
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16 comments:

  1. That's a great photo, and interesting that should have a link to the American AA this week, and I to the British version of the same organisation. Funnily enough, I gave up AA membership some years ago for similar reasons, but miss the excellent maps they produced too! I've grown up with maps, and always like to have a good idea of where I'm headed. I might even admit to having a small - okay, not so small - collection of maps, accumulated over many, many years, and always use paper maps or map books in the car when driving places. However, I think I might resort to using a GPS when trying to negotiate the crazy spaghetti intersections and freeways in southern California.

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    1. I love old maps and so wish my folks hadn't thrown out all the old ones from the '50s and '60s when we drove across country so much. The old nicely illustrated gas station maps were wonderful. There's a really nice book called "Hitting the Road: The Art of the American Road Map" that was published in '96 by Chronicle Books. Amazon sells used ones cheap.

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  2. They do make a feminine Mutt & Jeff. I have the same mistrust of GPS devices, and prefer the big picture of a foldout map. Having traveled a lot in both England and Scotland, I've been lost and found a few times too without an Ordance Survey map.

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    1. I was trying to come up with those names today! I just couldn't remember them. Yes, female Mutt and Jeff.

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  3. I'm with you. I like paper maps. My husband programed our GPS one time for a trip to see our son & his family. On our way home we momentarily decided to check out some things at a nearby store. When we turned off the highway the darned GPS kept telling us we'd made a wrong turn & wouldn't let up till I turned it off. Sheesh!

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    1. That sounds like when a relative was coming for a visit and for some reason the stupid GPS took them the longest and slowest possible way through town. Instead of staying on the main highway it took them onto a side street that is full of street art. It made no sense at all and I told her to listen to me on how to go home and not the stupid phone.

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  4. So very shiny - the car and the ladies’ hair! I wonder which they are more proud of.

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    1. I'm betting the frocks are also in the running as faves.

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  5. I love the wavy hair and the great dresses. An elegant era. The GPS gets up the long way sometimes but at least it gets us there.

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    1. I have a friend who cannot get from here to there without her GPS.

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  6. I was just following a map on the iPad yesterday trying to get to a restaurant. The restaurant wasn't THERE. I thought it had gone out of business. Oh well. So we kept driving, and suddenly there it was 5 blocks away on the opposite side of the street. After our lunch, we needed to get back to the main highway, and the map showed a turn onto 210. There was NO 210 -- it was 70. What's up with that? How could the computer get it so wrong?

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    1. Never trust a computer for something a human brain does better. That's my motto.

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    2. Humans make mistakes, but for a real cockup you need a computer :-)

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  7. It is a wonderful old photo. The look alike hairdos are wonderful. I wonder how long that it stayed in style. I like seeing the old cars.

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    1. According to Wikipedia it was popular through the '20s. For me, far too much work.

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