Navigation and Travel on the SL Mainland
The most amazing feature of Second Life Mainland is the availability of protected waterways and roadways, which are free, public access paths, routes, and regions. Protected areas are owned by Linden Lab, most often by Governor Linden but sometimes the LDPW and others.
Protected areas can be in the form of an open ocean, or a waterway within an ocean or region, or a roadway though a region. There are also public railways that are on protected land, often under ownership of the SLRR.
The routes are easy to find, once you know what to look for, this post explains how to setup your viewer to be able to see the navigable routes around you.
The fist thing to do is to enable your mini-map, this is key to helping you find your way. You enable it by selecting World - Mini Map, or on a PC, press CTRL + Shift + M to toggle it
By default, the map appears on the upper right side of your screen
Note: The coverage of you mini map is based on your configured Draw Distance. So a small draw distance of, say 96m, limits how much you can see ahead of and behind you on the mini map.
While it might be reasonable to boost your draw distance to see more, doing that can cause lots of problems, especially when traveling
A good Draw Distance is in the range of 128-200m. You can of course change it as you like, depending on the conditions.
Another good practice is to disable shadows. Shadows use a lot of CPU/GPU resources and this strains your system, which you experience as lag. Temporarily disable Shadows - set it to None, when traveling
Once you see the mini map, right-click anywhere within the mini map, which pops-up a menu
From the menu, select Show - Property Lines as shown here:
Once you enable that, your map might look something like this, depending on what is around you:
Note on that map that there's what looks like paths among all of the properties. Those paths are, generally speaking, protected routes. You can safely follow those paths without having to worry about ban lines, private property, or access restrictions.
Also, check the top of your viewer's window (Firestorm or Second Life) as you travel! If the text at the top includes the word Protected, that means you are on a protected, public access route.
In this example, there's a path leading across the top of the mini map that is in the water, so you can navigate this area by boat. The green areas are likely roadways. You can also fly a plane over these routes.
Here's another view:
In this case, the path in the waterway leads to an open ocean, which is all also public access. To the right of the ocean, you can see a straight, vertical path - this is also a protected route within the ocean
Using the mini map is a great way to discover routes around you, an maybe in new places!
Heterocera, Sansara, and Nautilus are all great places to start exploring. Intrepid travelers and shoppers might find navigation maps and HUDs, and if you are reasonably good at web searching, you'll find online resources with maps and other information as well.