How Geoguessr Ruined My Life

People who know me know I love traveling.  Put me in any major city, and I'll start poking into every nook and cranny I can find to locate the best sites outside of your standard tourist traps.  In Rome I found the best food I ate at a restaurant off the beaten path.  In Ireland I found an entire park hidden away off the main roads that was tranquil and pristine.  Of course, I also found a burned out house that was stripped bare, save for a single charred painting hanging on a wall.  Even cities in the United States have given up their secrets to me, from San Francisco to Augusta, from Orlando to Seattle.

However, I've been able to balance my love of travel with being "normal."  I've maintained a job, limited social life, and kept up to date on a lot of major events.  That's all changed now.  Now, my life is essentially over, and it's all the fault of Geoguessr.

What is Geoguessr, you might ask?  It's a website game I discovered in a recent xkcd web strip.  The game takes place across five rounds.  An image from the street view of Google Earth is presented to you. You can rotate it around, and attempt to figure out where in the world it might be.  Once you have a general idea, you can zoom in to a map of the world (powered by Google Earth, naturally), tag the spot you think it is, and then enter it as your guess.  Depending on how far you are from the real spot, you earn points.

Simple, right?

Maybe you get a covered bridge in New Hampshire, or a major intersection in Moscow or a beach in Brazil.  Sometimes you can see area-specific names that help solve it.  Other times, you're in a rural villag with no signs looking at three abandoned cars and a rotting church.

Then it gets interesting.

Maybe you need to identify the area's elevation based on the plant life.  Maybe you need to check the car types and figure out where they might use them.  Maybe you need to examine what the road itself looks like, and try to identify the line style.

Sounds like a challenge, right?  Well, I went two days doing it this way and then I learned it's even worse.

See, there are crescent-like shapes on the picture, and each time I saw them I thought maybe they just pointed from north to south to help orient the viewer.  It turns out that if you click on one, it sends you in that direction (because the Google Map truck is always moving, always taking photos).

I followed a single lane road in the woods for twenty minutes, multiple turns, no signs, before I gave up.  Turns out it was in Poland.  Or Belgium.  I don't even remember, as I managed to feel helplessly lost without leaving my chair.  But it appears there's no limit to how far you can go.  Want to travel from Maine to Florida or travel Route 66?  Yeah, you might be able to do that.

I'm doomed, because I will spend all my time exploring where that truck went to.  I want to know how it went down a bike path around a bandstand in New Orleans.  

I recommend everybody try it.  And if you stumble upon me somewhere retracing a path across the Alps to figure out which mountain I was on, please take pity on me.  Buy me an atlas so I have something to reference.