Thursday, January 01, 2015

Mapscape Of North Carolina

I am a big fan of maps.  Especially unorthodox maps.  Maps you can walk on get bonus points.

So, you can imagine, I was quite chuffed to visit an accurate large scale 3D relief map of North Carolina and the surrounding area, located in High Point North Carolina.

There is, of course, a virtual cache here, called Mapscape Of North Carolina (GCF6D0).

The map is quite large, and sits on the floor of an amphitheater.  I do not know the exact size of it, but a rough estimate is about 35ft x 25ft (-ish).  Based on the scale, the feet of the pictured Lego minifig takes up just under a square mile of real estate on the map.
The map above contains the entirety of North Carolina, as well as the majority of South Carolina as well as parts of Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and a sliver of West Virginia.

The terrain is moulded into the map, so one gets a visual representation of the landscape.  These are the Blue Ridge Mountains near where I live.  Lenoir is right around where the dark green of the mountains meets the light green of the piedmont, around where the "river" crosses the colour line. 
This is a better angle to get an idea of the moulded terrain of the map.
I spent a fair amount of time looking at the map, and trying to determine where my home town was located. The water does not seem to be super accurate, and the roads are not drawn in, so its tough to be accurate about these things, but  I stuck my minifig avatar as close as I could get to Lenoir... so I live approxo-roughly here:
If you like maps, I highly recommend dropping by the Mapscape of North Carolina and checking this one out.