Comments for The Gentle Art of Landmark-Snarfing

The Gentle Art of Landmark-Snarfing: 08/03/07

I spot my quarry. Quietly, I sidle up to it, making sure to stay downwind. I know that these things move around in the dark. They are historical markers, they are elusive, and they are sneaky.

Since mid-2003 I have "snarfed," or hunted down, over 1200 historical markers and historic sites, and have logged them at Markeroni, the Gentle Art of Landmark-Snarfing. In a nutshell, it's a site where you can find out information about historic places in the USA, Canada, Australia and British Isles, locate them, then come back to log your finds into a "journal."

"Snarfing" is the act of locating said sites in the wild. It derives from a geeky slang word meaning "to download data rapidly for later use." In other words, not unlike what happens at a historical marker!

Way back in 2003, I was planning to go on a solo, month-long motorcycle tour. I trained by going on rides to find markers for a scavenger hunt. My bike had other plans, however, and broke two gears just a couple of days before departure. I was not pleased!

Many months of planning creates its own energy, and that energy had to go somewhere. I figured that, since I couldn't go on a long trip, maybe I could go on lots of short trips. Thus, I decided to visit every state historic landmark in California and leave a Book Crossing book at each one.

There are over 1100 of them. I like a good quest.

I needed a place to log those trips, so I thought of creating a site. Hm. Historical markers. Historic landmarks! Marker...landmark...markeroni! The name stuck. I started to put together some pages and then thought, "I know! Why not make it a place where everyone can log their visits to historical markers and compare notes?" I had already learned that these sites weren't always easy to find, so I thought that an information-sharing kind of site would be neat.

Quickly, I discovered that every state in the USA and every province in Canada had a landmark or marker system of some kind. The original idea of Markeroni immediately exploded into something way bigger than I'd ever imagined, and these days there are roughly 80,000 landmarks in the database for people to find. Others are discovered and added almost daily. We include landmarks (not always with markers) that have some kind of legal preservation status (designation), as well as museums, war memorials and monuments of various kinds.

We even have a giant teapot. Really!

From the beginning, I wanted Markeroni to be light-hearted and informal. I figured that while there is certainly a place for archives and dust, I got my start in history by crawling around Scottish burial mounds. I already knew that history could be fun. Thus, there's at least one activity where you're encouraged to wield penguins and pandas and even Russian doll mascots. ;)

Please feel free to come take a look. Even if Markeroni isn't for you, perhaps you know somebody who might enjoy it. Our homepage link is http://www.markeroni.com and we have a Tell-a-friend tool also. We'd be delighted to have you!

Thanks so much to pussreboots for inviting me to make this guest post! August 13th marks Markeroni's fourth birthday and during August each month we make a concerted effort to TEAM--Tell Everyone About Markeroni :: grin ::

markeroni