I was recently writing with a fellow blogger about my first Spark of the Week post and image, and realized something I haven’t ever talked about here, something that can give me hours of inspiration and enjoyment: studying maps.

One semester in college I worked in the copy room of the Health Sciences library at Mizzou.  It was an awesome job because it was quiet and I could read or study and not have a lot of interruptions. One night, I had gotten all my work done and had a few hours to kill, so I retrieved one of the atlases from the main floor.

I was so happy.

I spent several dreamy hours studying regions of the middle and far east so closely, looking at the topographical markings of the different lands and imagining what it would be like to travel there. Then I studied Gujarat, India, a state my then-boyfriend was from, and looked around his home town, trying to place the landmarks he had told me about in context.

I remember buying an atlas to have here at home when I first moved in, and spent several nights just alone in the recliner – no TV, no music, nothing. Just studying the pages.

Last year, at the renaissance fair in Bristol, WI, I found a vendor selling maps he had created of different fictional worlds: Narnia, Middle Earth, Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, Asgard, Atlantis, and Verona according to Romeo and Juliet, to name a few. He had drawn them on old parchment-y paper, you know, so it fit in perfectly with the imaginative (and nerdy) environment or a renaissance fair.