Redundant Maps and Walking to Paris

I tried to walk to Paris once. Now, of course, that sentence doesn’t mean much without context. In fact, the context is what makes this message most important. Long story made short, my train arrived in a suburb of Paris late at night, I took a bed at the closest hostel, and in the morning I made my way into the city centre. 

First thing in the morning, I got directions to take a city bus to the center of town. Promptly after taking that bus to the end of it’s route I realized as I departed the bus that I’d taken it the wrong direction. I was further from my destination, but being eager and alone I had nothing but time. 

Thinking somewhat logically, I retraced the path of my bus on the opposite side of the street with hopes that I could catch the proper bus (in the right direction) at any one of the stops I’d pass along my way to the city centre. 

On the back of each bus stop was a map of the neighborhood I was in. On the map, my walk started at the far right border of the city and the far left hand border of this neighborhood map was simply labeled “Paris”. Based on my walking speed and progress checks of these maps along the way, I was making good progress. After about 90 minutes, I was halfway across the map. I could tolerate another 90 minutes of walking to get to Paris, I thought, so I kept walking quickly to get to my goal.  

Several bus stops later, the smaller neighborhood map I’ve been referencing was posted to a smaller scale as a highlighted section of a much larger map, which included Paris proper. The map I’d walked over 90 minutes to make it halfway across now represented a section of the larger map about the size of a quarter. If it took me 90 minutes to walk a half inch on this map, the Eiffel tower was three and a half feet further. When I thought it was making progress and halfway there, I walk no where close and was trying to walk a distance that was suited for a long bus or train ride.

I’d been looking at an unhelpful map all along. It wasn’t until I was sitting on a speeding subway train for an hour that my eyes peered up as if to imagine the ground above me flying by and I shook my head that I attempted to cover such distance on foot. 

While you didn’t need to know about my blunder backpacking in Paris, you might be able to benefit from my mistake. The lesson here is that when using the wrong criteria we can make dangerously erroneous evaluations about our progress. While it might seem that the most important thing in life is to stand tall, one could argue that you first need an accurate ruler for height.