If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is Google Earth worth?

I came to Spain to travel by bike, see the country, the culture, and to escape from being stuck behind a desk in my mid-20s. I can vividly recall the anxiety I felt while sitting in front of a large flatscreen monitor showing me Europe on Google Earth. Soon, I would be there... IN there!! So why is it that I spent most of the day today sitting in front of a computer alt-tabbing between Google Earth, Google Maps, GMail, and Wikipedia??

One reasons, maybe the only one that I can believe and sleep well tonight, is that for me it is important to have a context when I travel. You see a statue of some dude riding his horse wielding a sword. You take a photo. You move on. But with some context, you know that the statue is of Cid el Campeador, who at one point managed to win military control over most of Castilla. You know that his horse was one of a kind, imported from the middle east, and worthy of legend itself. You find out that his sword, La Tizona (yes, it had a name), was given to him by a mentor, and it is preserved in a museum in Madrid. All of a sudden, the statue seems to take on importance it didn´t have before.

The moral of the story is that the world around us is filled with stories. Some are evident, some require some digging, some will never be discovered. It is these stories that give texture and meaning to what you see when you travel, and traveling without such context is empty in comparison. Sure, a guide can give you context, and often a local tour guide is the best, as they become a fitting part of the experience. But guided tours often don´t go at your pace, and they cost money which eats into the whole "budget travel" thing. And guidebooks, though cheap and useful, leave me with a residual taste of being spoon-fed a trip.

My research in front of the computer is not unlike the research travelers have done for years and years. Just like email has replaced letters, Wikipedia has replaced the Encyclopedia, and Google Maps/Earth have replaced the Atlas. But unlike their material counterparts, these virtual data sets interact. Click on Burgos, and Wiki will tell you it´s got just under 170,000 people. Google Maps will show you all the roads and tell you the shortest road from Burgos to Santiago de Compostela. And Google Earth allows hoardes of other data to find its place in the world: lodging, food, ATMs, photos from random people, even models of buildings.

Information overload? Maybe. For some, having all this information at your fingertips, and fingering through it before the trip takes away some of the surprise of the trip. If you´re one of those, then don´t look. Me, I like trying to find the best road between to points, and maybe while I´m looking for it I´ll find out that there is a site on the way worth the stop. For example, who would have known that there is a Guttenberg Bible about 4 blocks from where I´m writing this? And I can still go out and get lost whenever I want. Make a right turn here, a left turn there, and I´m in back in the land of the unknown, ready to discover the old fashioned way.