The Life, Death and Rebirth of the Sticker Map

One of our favorite gifts off of our wedding registry was a map for the back of the RV. It was a blank map with a set of stickers for each state so that you add each one as you go. We very dutifully took pictures as we put each one on, alternating who got to do it as we went.

              

Sadly, as we mentioned in Travel Update 6, after putting on Pennsylvania at our camp site, we left the roll of stickers sitting on the bike rack when we drove away. We didn't realize our mistake until we got to New Jersey and were ready to put our new sticker on. Having just crossed a bridge that was tolled in the other direction it would have been about 60 miles to get back to the camp site to try to find them. In hindsight we should have turned around, but we thought our best course of action was to try to repurchase the map off of Amazon to replace the stickers.

When we got to internet several hours later in New York, we discovered that our current map was no longer available. At this point it was much to late to turn back. We made the decision to buy a new map, that was a close to the same size as possible and have it meet us in Portland, Maine. Not fully ready to give up on the old map we stuck all the stickers on the new one while the base was still on it's cardboard.

     

Then we stuck the new map in the window, having both maps showing for a couple of weeks. We decided we wanted to wait until we could go back to our Pennsylvania camp site and make sure the stickers weren't there before we fully committed and peeled the old map off. 

So we lived the two map life for a little bit. 

 

But after checking to find the stickers, and not succeeding, it became clear that we needed to say goodbye to our first sticker map. 

  

And put on our new one. 

 

We kept the original map on the cardboard that the second one came on as a memento, even though we have no idea what we're going to do with it. 

And now, we're getting back to our old sticker map habits.