A Navigational Comedy of Errors (with maps)
When I moved to Houston, my family gave me a GPS.
They were afraid, I suspect, that I’d head out for work one day and end up in Peru. Or Greenland.
Their fears were not totally unjustified. I once got lost in Palmer. Palmer, for those of you who have never been there, has a population of Not Very Many and less streets than letters in its name.
Behold Palmer:
A person who could get lost in Palmer could get lost anywhere. The GPS was sort of a necessity. I will say, in my defense, that at least when I got off the plane I knew I was in Houston, Texas. When I punched the address for my hotel into my GPS, it thought for a long, long time and then told me it would take a week to drive to the hotel, and I would have to pass through Canada. I was halfway to the hotel before the thing realized we were no longer in Alaska.
I had reason to believe, in other words, that I was not hopelessly incompetent when driving. Getting lost in Palmer, I thought, would be the highlight of my navigational Comedy of Errors.
Wrong. So, so wrong.
When I bought Ro, a friend recommended a particular lumber yard for shavings. She told me how to get there. She drew a map. She showed me what everything on the map meant.
All I had to do, I kid you not, was make two right turns.
Got it, I said.
The next day, I set out for the lumber yard, humming We’re going to the wood works and we’re gonna get shaaaavings… we’re going to the wood works of love!
Stuff like that is reason #682 that I decline to sing in public.
An hour later, I texted my friend: There is no lumber yard on Telge.
There was a pause, and she texted back something to the effect of: No, it’s on 2920. Next to the feed store.
A flurry of texts and phone calls later, and I was at the lumber yard.
I blame the episode on my exhaustion (I was burnt out at work, and barely functional out of work). Certainly my friend had done everything she could for me, sort of driving me there herself. And, actually, I had ridden with her to the feed store before. I have no real excuse for being unable to find the lumber yard.
Today I had to go back to pick up more shavings.
No problem. I was confident of the exit: Spring Cypress/Cypress Rosehill.
I got the exit right. I forgot that the road I wanted was Cypress Rosehill, not Spring Cypress. About the time Spring Cypress ended at Telge, I realized I had made the wrong choice.
Anyone else in the world would have thought Hey! Telge! That’s the street the lumber yard is NOT on, but it intersects with the street the lumber yard IS on! (Reference above, about being lost on Telge on the previous attempt to get to the feed store.)
In the end, this is how I got to the lumber yard:
Twice now I have failed to find a place that only requires two right turns to reach. Twice!
This is worse than being lost in Palmer. This is worse than the time I got lost walking down Vesuvius (for all those people who think you can’t get lost going down a mountain, a very kind cab driver somewhere in Italy is still probably regaling his fellow cabbies with stories of the Stupidest American Ever; he would be happy to set you straight on that particular misconception).
Really, the only way I could top this incident would be to get lost driving on a straight line.
I might be tempting fate by saying that kind of thing out loud.