by Sara Zoë
About a week into last year's challenge, I found myself pulling my hair out around a simple thing: I'd be in a store, I'd be looking at labels and farm names, and I'd have no idea where a town was. For example, Maine is a huge state. A lot of Maine is within my NH seacoast 100 miles, but a lot isn't. So I found me a bizzare but simple site to check on things once I was online, and made me a map to bring with me to the store.
Here's the website, just plunk in two towns names and you get the distance between them as the crow flies. Seriously. I know it looks like this website isn't going to know where Lincoln, Maine is. But it does.
Since I sometimes shop at fancy foodie stores where the purveyors also care about such things, my map gave me an easy introduction to conversation. The cheese lady saw me with my map spead out over her case and asked me what was up. I was able to tell her (despite shyness about such things), and together we could look at the map and figure out where a town was on the spot. I found the map at a yard sale, then played the string and pencils game to make the circle.
Sara Zoë is a farm groupie on the seacoast of New Hampshire and blogs between grad school and work about folkfood
