I like writing travel guides. I like it a lot, even when I complain.

But I think I like making the maps more. Maybe I wouldn’t like cartography as a full-time job, but as a break from all the damn writing and phone-number-checking, pulling out my ruler, white-out and colored pens and getting down to business on a map is really, really satisfying.

And when I was just in Taos, I found a product that makes me want to do my maps even more: mechanical colored pencils (see product #128-26)! Dude. I can’t tell you how exciting this is. The colors are really sharp and rich too. Years ago, I experimented with colored pencils, but the color was too faint and didn’t read clearly, and I could never get a sharp-enough point. Now I have a random assortment of highlighters and colored gel-ink pens, but the drawback with those is that it’s easy to smear the lines if you’re moving too fast. Also, those gel-ink pens are all sort of glittery, so my maps wind up looking like The World According to Hello Kitty.

But colored mechanical pencils! They never need sharpening, first of all. There are five colors, plus black, in the box. That’s enough for hotels, restaurants, text changes, graphics changes and some wild cards TBD.

OK–must quit mooning over my pencils and get to the writing. We do what we have to do so we can do what we want to do.