April 11, 2007
Google Maps' Hidden Historical Joke Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:25 PM EST An e-mail list I look in on—it is about my favorite author of alternate history—generates a fair amount of traffic on other topics. Today someone posted the interesting fact that if you use Google Maps to chart a driving route from New York City to Paris, you are given careful directions until step 23 or so, at which point, at a pier in Boston, you are told to swim the Atlantic. I tried it, and it turned out to be true. At that point in my Googling I thought this the whole of the joke buried inside the Google Maps machinery, but reading on, I found what looks suspiciously like another. After crawling ashore at Le Havre, you are carefully directed to a local road, then a traffic circle, and after a few more turns you take the exit from the A131/Rouen/Paris/Evreux onto the A13/E05/L'Autoroute de Normandie. After that it’s a bit more driving, then Paris. I am now wondering whether the Google prankster had more history on his mind than I had initially assumed. Translated into a more conventional joke form: How do you get to Paris from New York? Well, first you crawl ashore in Normandy . . .
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