For the airline industry, route maps serve as informational marketing material, showing where the carrier flies with stylized graphics designed to complement the airline’s brand identity. But who says you have to be an airline to flaunt where you’ve been?
Ever since I was a pre-teen, I’ve maintained what I call a personal route map. When you create a diagram of everywhere you’ve been (whether it’s around the world or just around the region where you live), you’re creating a visually engaging, always evolving keepsake — like a family quilt, where each square symbolizes an important element in a life story.
Why on earth would I draw parallels between an airline industry marketing tool and a family heirloom? Well, like a family quilt or a photo album, a personal route map can be a representation of who you are, where you come from and what’s important to you. It can evoke happy memories and document landmark moments in your life, from family vacations to big moves.
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Granted, I was predisposed to look to airline paraphernalia for inspiration as I searched for my own identity as a young adolescent. I talk about the roots of wanderlust and the value of personal route maps in my new book, Prepare for Departure: Notes on a Single Mother, a Misfit Child, Inevitable Mortality and the Enduring Allure of Frequent Flyer Miles. For me, travel has always represented many things: escape, glamour and excitement. When I was young, travel provided respite from my humdrum daily life as I jetted off (or rode in my mother’s care) to see family and find new adventures.
In many ways, the final destination of your trip isn’t as important as the trip itself. Whether it’s a widebody journey across the globe or a quick drive to the town next to yours, travel opens your life to new possibilities. It’s also a very visual experience — one that is perfectly portrayed with an equally visual route map.
Unfortunately, airline route maps aren’t as prominent as they used to be. In the days before the internet, back when every airline had a printed inflight magazine and vast ticket offices in major cities, route maps were a way to show off networks in an easily digestible format. They were often beautiful, ornate or spectacularly modern in their design — an eye-catching way to invite viewers to gaze and daydream about their next vacation or family reunion. Rail lines and bus lines have also relied on route maps to inform and entice travelers.
When I was in my early teens, I started drawing route maps of everywhere I flew. My trips were limited to domestic flights, of course, and mostly limited to trips between Rochester, New York, and Louisville and Paducah, Kentucky — with a few random lines extending to Florida, Arizona and California after my mother and I flew to see further-flung relatives. But that route map meant a lot to me. It represented who I was and it bolstered my identity at a time when I was still struggling with my self-image.
How to Make Your Own Personal Travel Route Map
Now that you’ve heard about what personal route maps can do for you, are you ready to make your own? There are many ways to create one. As a decidedly 20th-century child, I drew my maps by hand (we had no computers, imagine that!). Markers and pens provide the boldest looks and hand-drawn maps are still wonderful for those with an artistic touch. But you can also use a variety of digital drawing tools and graphics programs. My personal route map is still hand drawn (and updated after every new route I fly), but for the informational media kit that accompanies my book, I used the Canva app to create a bolder, cleaner and more modern look.
What should you include in your personal route map? My own personal version aims to include every single flight and connection that I’ve taken in my life (I’m kind of an airline and travel nerd, so even document every change of plane). But for my book’s media kit, I created a more general, simplified map that represents the movements of my entire immediate family — and rather than documenting individual vacations and flights, the family map showcases the long-term migration routes of my parents, my sister and me over multiple decades, showing where each of us has lived. It’s a very different map, but it’s a strong visual reminder of where my nuclear family comes from.
For inspiration, you might want to search for vintage airline route maps online or check out a book called Airline Maps: A Century of Art and Design, which does a wonderful job of highlighting the evolution of the route map concept, from vibrant, finely detailed paintings of the 1930s to the minimalist designs of the 1970s. You might prefer the stark, no-nonsense lines of Syrian Air in the 1980s, the gentle curves of Ozark Air Lines in the 1970s or mural-style maps of United Airlines in the 1940s.
You can decide what’s important for you to document. You might want to go the individual route and showcase everywhere you’ve visited on vacation or on business trips, or focus on the major shifts and moves in your life or those of your family as a whole. And don’t forget that it doesn’t have to be limited to air travel; you can include road trips and travel by bus, car and train, too (or even by foot, for that matter).
For me, having a personal route map is about more than just obsessively recording every vacation and every business trip. It’s about keeping a record of where I’ve been, who I am and the experiences I’ve had in the places I visit. In Prepare for Departure, I write about how material things in life aren’t permanent (my book is actually a memoir about life with my mother, our travels together and how our relationship changed in the final years of her life). But one thing is certain: you can lose all the material possessions you own, but you can never lose the memories of the places you’ve been. You can never lose your personal route map. (Well, okay, it is possible to lose your memory. But if you have a personal route map, at least you’ll have something to perhaps spark some memories.)
Whether you’ve gone around the corner or around the world, travel can be an enriching and life-changing experience. Where you’ve been is part of who you are. Why not document it?
I’m a travel writer, travel blogger and Mexico travel specialist, and I love sharing travel tips to make your next vacation or business trip better. I also have a new memoir coming out this year: Prepare for Departure: Notes on a Single Mother, a Misfit Son, Inevitable Mortality and the Enduring Allure of Frequent Flyer Miles. Pre-publication sales start in May 2022 and the book publishes in July 2022.
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