Day 68: Grrr! and Great

Tuesday
I guess you can't expect everything to always go exactly to plan, especially when you are living a sort of nomadic life and your environment is constantly changing as you move around. So I suppose we have become used to being fairly flexible, in fact I try to build flexibility into the decisions we make. Sometimes this drive Sally mad, as I say, "Well we could do this, or we could do this, or if we want we could do that", however sticking to a plan can be disastrous. So when changes to your bedrock activities happen it can throw you. Having said that the change that happened today was not dramatic, but very frustrating. Since we started travelling in 2007 I have tried to keep a blog going, and found that Google Maps has been the best way to show where we have been, or where we are. In 2011 Google, in it's wisdom introduced changes to the mapping programme, far from being an improvement it made showing a route, with a number of stops, quite difficult to do. It also limited the number of stops you could enter onto one map, unless you purchased the 'Pro' version, which considering my background philosophy towards the Internet and the fact that it didn't do what I wanted it to do in the first place, meant that there was no way that I would BUY into the mapping programme. Fortunately they left the old mapping system running, calling it the 'Classic Maps', so I was able to keep the maps going. UNTIL TODAY!!!! I went to modify the map for our current blog only to find that it had been changed to the now mapping system, and looked awful, and I couldn't edit it, and kept getting the message that the map was too big and I needed to switch (buy,at $5 per month) to 'Pro Maps'. Not only that but all the maps I had drawn over the years had all been switched to this new system. There was no explanation for this, it just happened. After a frustrating hour I tracked down that this was actually a change made by Google, not some error on my or their part. Well I just did not cope with this and found that I was repeating Sally's mantra of 'Why do they keep changing things, why can't they leave these things alone?'
So I am still continuing to discover that my views are not at all important to a business like Google, that having something work quite well (not perfectly) is not good enough, they have to be able to monetize it(as though they don't make enough money anyway).
So what have I learned from this, First I now need to find another mapping system that will do the job that I want done and secondly to reconfirm that while we have the illusion that we are in control of our lives (destiny) very small changes in the tide of world affairs can make that illusion painfully ephemeral and remove that control. In this case it was a small change in Google's business plan, but it could just as easily be change in policy for say American Visas, travel insurance (this will happen next year, when we hit 66 years old). A small fall, a drift across the white line on the road. All the time these things don't happen we are fine, but round every corner, at every turn is the potential that will change our lives completely and ultimately .............
So final thought on that is to give grateful thanks that we have remained in sufficient control of our lives to be able to do so much.
The GREAT part is that despite a small hitch with the planes our friend Sandy had arrived and we have collected her from the Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix and we have returned safely to the trailer, so we are looking forward to a great week together.