>When we first moved into this neighborhood, we did lots of walking in the evenings, and I made a habit of turning down side streets until I built a really good mental map. I do worry that having a GPS available cuts down on that kind of mental exercise. OTOH, I'm in no hurry to get rid of my GPS. While I don't use it for local stuff, it's really useful when I get outside my own neighborhood.

Note to self: dump all those printouts of Google maps that the car is full of.

This being quite a large city, and with the youngest daughter being in a magnet school, means that her friends are scattered over quite a large area, most of it actually quite far. So every now and then I get to print a new map, learn a new neighborhood, and end up with another sheet of paper on the car floor :).