Spatial interaction

When I examined my travel log the thing that stuck out to me the most was the way that my interaction with space changed depending on who I was with. When I'm by myself I have a pretty basic routine and a very set route I move along but when I'm working or with friends everything changes. I work as a nanny for a family who lives outside the city and when I'm working my interaction with space changes; I go different places, I drive a different car, and take different paths, and even “occupy” a different stage of life. When I'm with friends we travel as a group which changes the way we travel and we are much less goal oriented in our movement than I am when I'm by myself. My interactions with people are the main factors that lead to variation

I work as a nanny for a family with three kids of varying ages. There is a five year old, an eleven year old, and a sixteen year old and they all have very different needs. Each kid affects the way I move in space differently. I spend the most time with the youngest kid because the other two are at school for most of the day and so he dictates most of my on travel around the neighborhood. His needs are all in and around the house so we travel on foot. If we drive somewhere he has to sit in a complicated seat belt that he violently hates and so I only take the time to strap him in if driving is the only option. We walk and bike everywhere we need to go. He likes to circle around the neighborhood on his bike, visit the play ground, and walk to his neighbor's horse pasture. He is afraid of large roads and fast cars so we take back streets and round about paths. If I were by myself, for some reason inspired to visit a play ground by myself, than the way would I travel would be different because...

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...nd walk around or hang out on campus. The big change is that there are too many of us to fit in a car so we do a lot of walking and sometimes biking. When we walk we take a different route than a car would because there are a lot of walking trails and short cuts away from the road. Its much slower and takes a lot more effort which increases the friction of distance so often we end up staying on campus, our critical distance is much closer when we are on foot. If I do go out with friends however the way we move is different than if I were alone because the destination isn’t a set. We usually walk around the main streets in Old Town without any goal in mind and so we end up going back and forth along that stretch of shops. Beyond interactions like this I almost exclusively move around with a destination in mind.

Works Cited

Introduction to Geography: 12th Edition