Christie Mastric

I don’t let the lack of time or a budget keep me from seeing all parts of the world.Google Maps makes a great travel agent. My husband Dave, who is adept at navigating this app, introduced me to this digital hobby.

I use it to find my way when I’m driving, but Dave is really adept at it, and can use the street view option with ease. Me, I still end up going in circles in the middle of a street at times.

Thus, I let him be the navigator on his personal computer when we go on our nightly excursions.

From our humble home in north Marquette, we can traverse the globe to the Russian Far East…in the summer…and not under the Stalin regime.

Here you can get a look at the Institute of Biological Problems of the North.

Yes, there’s a place with that name.

On its website at ibpn.ru, or at least the part that isn’t in Russian, you can learn that the IPBN is the only academic institution that has been carrying out fundamental investigations on different problems of northern biology for over 40 years.

One topic deals with parasitic worms of fishes from the northern part of the Sea of Okhotsk, and their medical and veterinary significance. I’ll spare you the details, but I really hope the research proves fruitful. Anyway, I saw the building where such studies are ongoing.

We used the street view option when visiting other Russian towns, making note of the former utilitarian architecture that definitely had a Soviet feel to it, as well as more western-type buildings. St. Petersburg had an ornate touch, probably more so than when it was Leningrad.

The land expanse of Russia boggles the mind, so we didn’t get to spend too much time in places such as Oymyakon, which reportedly has an average winter temperature of minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit.

And I thought the Upper Peninsula was bad.

Speaking of the U.P., we went to northern Finland — in the summer, of course — and I noticed the simple yet appealing architecture, but didn’t see any reindeer.

I visited, in person, Martha’s Vineyard in 1992, and recalled seeing a row of really brightly colored houses. I wonder if they still existed, or if they did, if they were in need of a paint job.

So, off Dave and I went to the Vineyard. Fortunately, the Gingerbread Houses in Oak Bluffs on the island still are there. The fact they are clustered makes them more appealing — a visual overload that works. On their own, they might not blend into a neighborhood.

We also took a side trip to Hyannisport, Massachusetts, but didn’t see any Kennedys.

Dave and I have never been to Bar Harbor, Maine, but we did go on a Google stroll through the town where, we learned upon further research, there are many restaurants that will satisfy a lobster craving. Maybe someday not in the too distant future Google will find a way to let people experience places in another dimension — such as transporting a lobster roll by my computer keyboard when I’m looking at a restaurant.

We also traveled to some of Canada’s maritime provinces, specifically Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. I can’t remember some of the odd names, but I do recall getting the impression in one of the smaller towns that earning a living fishing was kind of important.

Sometimes sights are less exotic. I showed Dave my childhood home in South Bend, Indiana, where I grew up in the 1960s. I used to take a shortcut to St. John the Baptist Catholic School where I made up names for various spots along the way: the Village, which had a wooded path well-trodden by Catholic schoolchildren; the aptly named Triple Tree, a large tree with a trio of trunks on the school field; and the End of the World, which was a triangular-shaped sidewalk. Why I gave it that moniker, I don’t know. When I told adults I was going there, they’d say, “Don’t fall off.”

I think those landmarks still exist, although Google Maps doesn’t label them as such.

I still own, or at least am paying off, a small bungalow in DeWitt Township near Lansing. I have not seen it in years since a company is managing it for me, but am curious to what it looks like now, at least on the outside.

Unfortunately for my curiosity, the street view doesn’t appear to have been updated, so the plants that were growing by my house when I lived there still show up on the app.

It’s sort of like being frozen in time.

I’m wondering where my next Google Maps journey will take me. Will it be Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco? South Yemen? The north shore of Oahu in Hawaii?

Or will I just keep coming back to my downstate house, wondering how the garden is being kept up?

The world is at my computer fingertips.