DeLorme’s Map Store in Yarmouth, ME, is full of maps and travel navigation books and paraphernalia–a candy store for travelers
You can’t miss it at exit 17 off I-295 in Maine. The three-story-tall window display is a scale model of the earth. Named Eartha, the globe is one-millionth actual size and is the largest printed image of the earth ever created. One hundred forty gigabytes of data of satellite imagery, shaded relief, and bathymetry were needed to create the display.
Photo copyright Jeffrey Stevenson
The diameter is over 41 square feet, with a surface of over 5300 square feet. Eartha rests on a cantilevered arm and rotates on its axis tilted to 23.5 degrees. The day I was there the rotation speed was set at one rpm.
Cruise the DeLorme website at www.delorme.com
A Year on the Road 
AL, Glad you found the De Lorme globe. It has also impressed me,-an old Navy cartographer…..If I had known you were in that neighborhood I’d have suggested that you stop in to Walter Greene;s boatyard nearby, full of multihulls, some of them my designs.
Does this mean that you are heading south instead of to PEI?
Dick Newick
Dick,
I expect to hangout in New England and the Canadian Maritimes until mid-Sept with no particular plan or route yet. I would love to meet Walter Greene and visit his yard. Send location and contact info to my personal email.
AL
Very cool!!!
Quite impressive! There are wonders from people who spend time creating them all around us. I find it astonishing and wonder what it is they have, and I don’t, that motivates such focused and genuine interest and the time and labor to effect it. I want to live once more with that gene in my system – please, just once more.
One salient thought that occurs to me, things as they are, is that few outside of the “west” may address these opportunities. Watching a doc reviewing the state of current Iraq, recently, I was taken with their need to just stay alive – not because they were being shelled, although occasionally, but that they had no food, minimum spurts of electricity, little reprieve from the heat, education a thing of the past, rubble before them and the retail commerce we enjoy here, totally absent.
Look elsewhere and see even less.
Whoever inches us this way or that come next year, we must thank our forebearers for the opportunities that confront us and the good fortune to be here to address them now.
Imagine the wasted trillions pissed away in Iraq and Afghanistan. If this adventure were
to be examined one day in the future by students of the military, government, psychiatry, logic, philosophy, economics, and such, they would either howl in derisive disbelief or weep in utter despair. How could this have happened in our time?
Eartha is another reminder that we are all passengers on what Bucky Fuller termed Spaceship Earth. With the symptoms of global warming regularly manifesting themselves in weather extremes worldwide, I am wondering whether or not we humans can change how we are treating our earthly home before it is too late. I’m not sure that one day a year devoted to Earth Day will be enough to change our habits in time.
With that cheery thought, enjoy the moment!
What a wonderful sight! Thanks, Al!
Looks like a wonderful store and the maps are fantastic. I’ve always been a geography buff and I can sit with an atlas for hours and check out places in the world, to some I’ve actually traveled..
On another note, I have to agree with dbauer that I’m not sure there’s still time to save this wonderful planet from ourselves!.
Fabulous! Many thanks for sharing these pics ……I’ll be putting this place on my “to see” list.
Glad to see you’ve added the US eastward of the Mississippi to your bucket list. An easterner until 25 years ago, I have many ties to people and a collection of places to revisit and visit for the first time.
Maine is proving to be a delightful surprise. NIce people, basic civility (I’been here a month and realize I’ve yet to hear an automobile horn), they look you in the eye and say hello as you pass them on the street. An unhurried pace that would be crazymaking to city folk, and land/seacapes that are rivaled few other places I’ve ever seen.
I think there may be 40 weeks a year when Maine’s weather would seem unwelcoming to this tropical hummingbird, but those other dozen win an Academy Award.
AL