When I was a child I remember having my first experience with the internet, it was the old days when you had to connect with the telephone cable and you had to hear the classic dial up sound, it was so slow that we mainly used it for mail and chat only. In this same period, my mother loved to travel and all she had to create our own tours was a national tourism book and a map, I remember getting lost frequently and having to look for the places in the big list that was on the back of the map or having to ask to people on the streets, sometimes it was fun, others we were tired, but at the end we got to the places that we wanted.
The years went by, that connection became more powerful and suddenly I realized that I had access to more things, Google was more intuitive and even YouTube appeared. Since then, I was amazed with all the capabilities of the internet and I thought that one day I was going to be able to find everything I wanted with a single search. This let me help my mom to look for more places to visit when we were on vacation, so we started to realize that the national tourism book wasn’t as practical as a computer but at the same time, we were not able to bring the computer with us, so we started to download the information and print it as a guide every time that we went out. Little by little, we got used to organize our trips with the aid of the internet.
After some years, when I was 18 I had to go abroad by myself for the first time, but thankfully I had learnt how to schedule my entire trip when organizing the family vacations with my mom. However, my main concern was how to get to the places if I didn’t have a car, taxi’s weren’t an option and I had never took the subway before. It was then when I discovered Google Maps, since it was not that common in Mexico back then, I had to learn how to use it and it helped me a lot when I travelled to the US. So when my trip started, I felt in the future, I was able to search any place that I wanted to go and the map told me all the steps for taking the bus or the subway, and this was the first time that I didn’t got lost on a trip.
Since then, I have been a Local Guide willing to help more travellers like me, so that they can find the perfect places to visit by their own, just like I do everytime I plan my vacation. That is why I love to share my opinion and photos that I find helpful of places that I loved during trips or even in my own city, so that travellers from around the world can find the perfect places for them with the aid of another human that was there before. Nowadays, Maps is available and ready to use in all places that I have visited, and it have saved me a lot of time when organizing my trips. I even feel more confident organizing my own itineraries than booking a guided tour, so I like to feel that I am my family’s and my own tourist guide ready for the next travel plan and I hope that every person can feel this way thanks to Maps!
