I'm always looking around me on the Google map to see what coffee shops are within driving distance. I just love to be at one. Getting to stay somewhere nice for a few hours and work on something while also having some coffee and maybe a snack, is really grounding and inspiring for me. Even from a drive-through or taking it to go, I find it relaxing to make coffee a part of whatever else I'm doing in the day. I thrive on exploring the city where I live by doing things outside of my house, which of course wasn't an option for a while. While taking all necessary precautions, it's nice to be moving back in to the cafes that have opened back up.
When I moved back to my hometown not too long ago, finding the coffee shops and cafes was one of the ways I started to get to know the place in a new way, and find my way around. That process of discovering where the coffee shops and other coffee resources are, where there aren't, inspired me to create a map that puts an artistic spin on the distribution on coffee shops and similar places throughout the city. Let's imagine Jacksonville as a caffeinated night sky. Click to enlarge.
Every star on this map is somewhere a person might go to get some coffee. We don't really need a legend; the brightest ones are local coffee shops, cafes, and bakeries. Major chains including Starbucks, Dunkin', Panera, and McDonalds are smaller. Grocery stores are the faintest in the background. Meanwhile, the ground has been replaced by into outer space and the St. Johns River has turned into a gigantic cappuccino.
For this map, I've zoomed in on the central part of the city so everything is easiest to see. Most of the coolest places are in these areas anyway -- if you want a hint, I live somewhere on this map. Places to get coffee are by no means evenly distributed around the city. As is normal for most cities, there are little pockets where there are more of them, along main roads or in shopping areas, with big empty spaces between, which isn't very different from the way stars are distributed throughout the sky.
By turning off all of the roadways and exchanging them for the smooth, empty night sky, we get all of the coffee shops shaken out of the framework that already connects them in real life. So we can just look at where they are in relation to one another from one general perspective, and make some imaginative connections. Just like we do with the stars, grouping them arbitrarily into constellations by apparent relationship. So now we have Nellie the Dolphin and Howard the Duck, the Jaguar and Jaguar's Paw, and other Jacksonville-themed characters and objects in the sky, as a big coffee is poured out and runs all over the universe.
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