You Are Here (We Think

It's nowhere to be found in the 2005 Thomas Guide for Sacramento County. Don't bother searching MapQuest.com or Yahoo Maps. And no matter how long you ogle Google, you'll still come up empty-handed.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's here -- really -- an L-shaped little strip of recently framed houses and construction dust in the second-fastest-growing city in America. Stretching from Canadeo Circle (don't waste your time looking) to Canadeo Way (ditto), Nevers eventually will make its way into the map books.

It just won't happen soon enough to help the next wave of residents to this growing Central Valley subdivision as they struggle to guide moving vans and furniture trucks, pizza deliverers and landscape architects to the houses they know are there -- even though they're hard-pressed to prove it.

"People call in, they want to get a pool. We ask their name, address and information," said Tina Long, construction coordinator for McCauley Pool & Spa. "Then the [pool] designers come in and look in the Thomas Guide and can't find it. I've even had city inspectors call me and say, 'How do you go to so and so?' "

Building in the nation's burgeoning burbs is happening at such a torrid clip that it has outpaced cartographers' ability to map the latest subdivisions in places such as Elk Grove, Mountain House and Moreno Valley, all in California; Reno and Las Vegas; Phoenix; and central Florida.

Cartographers have struggled to chart the changing world for more than four millenniums, since Babylonians etched charts on clay tablets. But these days, the maps of America's fastest-growing suburbs are running woefully behind schedule at the same time that technological advances are raising travelers' expectations that it's possible to go from Point A to Point B without getting lost.

Even maps supplied by online services, which generally refresh their databases quarterly, or those zippy little global positioning system gadgets in expensive new cars and high-end rentals, are not much more current than many of the maps jammed inside glove compartments.

"It's tougher now with the growth to get a fully updated product to the market," said Edward Sweet, director of cartography, geographic information systems and research for Compass Maps Inc. of Modesto. "Scouting research is still very hard