So I am working on planning my next bike vacation, as regular readers will know.

I want to have a big European map, and draw movable arrows onto it, which I can revisit, tweak, and move, whilst seeing the map unchanged underneath.

I also want to “stack” arrows so that I can sorta animate/walk through them.

I considered XFig with which I have a long history, but which has several library dependencies under MacOS that are a pig to solve, so I lack a copy at the moment.

Then two thoughts struck me in quick succession:

1. “Powerpoint…” – by which I actually mean “Neo/OpenOffice” or “Keynote”, because lacking any Windows systems I tend to use the P-word generically to describe any presentation tool, cf: the American usage of “Scotch Tape” and “Xerox” – “…that’d do it just dandy.”

   This thought was quickly followed by:

2. “Planning a vacation in Powerpoint? How tragic is that?”

Nonetheless, it’d work.