Relative Something

On Sunday, we are hosting a neighborhood gathering for a cookie social. I was thinking ahead about a way I might match the people we hope will come, with the locations of their homes. I looked at property records online for an overhead view with the house numbers shown. I was considering the possibility of printing it out and having people sign in and mark their location on the map.

Unfortunately, that view, sized for a normal printer, ended up being too small to be much good. I may simply resort to having my computer there with the view that can be zoomed in and out. People could point at their homes on the screen.

While I was looking at the county map, I realized that it is a little different than the Google Earth view with which I am more familiar. I’m pretty sure the county image is older. It occurred to me that I should capture and save both for a historical reference.

Above is the view from the county property records site. Below is the view from Google Earth. It hasn’t changed since we started looking at it in 2012.

I did a search to see if I could learn how often the Google view gets updated. They claim to do so about every 3 years. We are due. I don’t know if that means they will soon post a current view, or that soon they will update it with a view from some time in the recent past.

It won’t be too hard for me to identify if a new view is from a time after we took possession, since we made a wide variety of frequent changes over the last 3 years. I’m particularly interested to see what the labyrinth looks like from space.

I’m also hoping it will be from a time when the horses were out in one of the fields. It would be really nice if that worked out.

As long as I was at it, I ventured over to a view of the old neighborhood in Eden Prairie where my family lived when I was a tween/teenager. I’ll post it here for my brothers and sisters to see. It is recognizable, despite a few changes. The road at the end of our driveway was a 2-lane back in the day, and crossing it led to a farm field, not another neighborhood.

I wonder if there are any photos of this view from back in the 1970s, maybe taken from one of the small planes out of Flying Cloud Airport.

That’s a past view I would particularly appreciate seeing.

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