So I go out to ride my bike. I’m doing about 6 miles’ distance easily, I figure I’ll try to increase it to…say 7.
I take a right out of my development, and head east. I continue east, toward the Hudson River, past CVS, then make a right, then I see Route 9. Well, I live **west ** of the river, right? So I make a right onto Route 9 and tool merrily along, assuming I’ll see my road soon enough.
Well I go a bit, and suddenly I wake up and realize…all the landmarks look like Route 9 North. I’m supposed to be going Southbound. I drive another mile, and finally turn around. Hmm…how did I get on Northbound?
I finally get back, a sweat-soaked 1/2 hour later, and tell my SO what happened, and go take a shower. In the shower it comes to me…
CVS is not east, not toward the river! CVS is **north ** of my house! I know where the damn river is, I navigate by it all the time, and YET I GOT LOST!
I have ZERO to NO sense of direction! Aaargh!
I am such a :wally. All in all I ended up doing probably 12 miles, almost double what I’d intended.
Well, I wasn’t going to bother posting about my stupidity today, but it might make you feel better, so here goes: I had a 4PM doctor’s appointment, so I left the 5-year-old in the care of her father, and left the house. Got in the van, turned on the key, adjusted the air conditioning (damn it was hot today!), selected the CD to listen to on my drive. Then I depressed the brake pedal in preparation for pulling out into the street. Hmmm, the brake pedal doesn’t seem to want to depress. I put the van in gear. Nothing. I go in the house to whine at hubby that something is wrong with the van. He comes out, takes one look at the control panel, and starts chuckling. Then he says “Well, it helps if you start the van”. Yup. I had turned the key far enough to start the accessories, but had not actually started the engine. :smack:
Oh, I forgot to mention: I’ve had my driver’s license for 24 years.
Same thing happened to me. I was walking to school and I thought I was going to be late, so I decided to take a short cut through the side streets instead of walking along the main street. I walked about two blocks north of my school and I missed it completely because I walked past the back of my school, which you can’t see because of all these trees. So, I got totally lost and spent about 15 minutes looking for the main road again. Surprisingly, I wasn’t late at all.
I was living in Lincoln, Nebraska last year and went out for a walk about a month after I had moved there. I meant to just walk on the sidewalks in a wide circle but the residential area that I was living in at the time wasn’t laid out on a grid so even though I took four rights, I wasn’t back on the street I should have been so I kept walking, sure I would find my apartment eventually, but wound up coming out on the freeway about a mile east of my complex when I had went east to begin with.
Realizing where I was, I turned around and tried to walk back (did I mention there was about a foot of snow on the ground at the time and I had to walk through it at times?) and wound up a mile west of my apartment this time, only I didn’t know it at the time. Finally, I just gave up because it was getting dark and went to a church where I asked one of the people there to use the phone so that I could call my roommate to come pick me up.
It was then that I realized just how close I was to our place and I felt like an idiot and had the hugest scab on my heel to remind me of my stupidity for the next two months.
My mother has graciously endowed me with a similar problem: all those of her line will call people by the wrong name. She has called my stepdad by my brother’s name, my brother by my name, and on one memorable occasion, yelled at the dog using my brother’s name. (Prompting a very confused “What did I do?” from him) My brother calls my stepsister by my name and vice versa. I do a little better with names, though I do have a tendency to say the completely wrong word without realizing it, prompting looks from everyone around me. Last night I pulled a doozy, though. I was talking to my stepsister’s BF and I called him by his brother’s name. The thing is, I can never remember his brother’s name!
My grandmother, when talking to me, invariably begins by calling me by my mother’s name. Realizing that’s incorrect, she then runs through the names of her three daughters, then the names of all her female grandchildren, oldest to youngest. The thing is, I’m the oldest, and she invariably skips me–and then goes to the boys’ names. It sounds something like this:
“Michel … Kar … Lind … Nanc … Meliss … Rebec … Laur … Sar … Jenn … Michae … Dan … Matthe … Andr … Jaso … Jona …”
At this point, I usually bust in with “When you know my name, Gram, I’ll be in the living room.” Snaps her out of it most of the time.
(And last week, I got lost trying to show someone the house I grew up in. I’ve lived in the same ten-square-mile area for 28 out of my 30 years on this earth.)
When I was 18, and had had my driver’s licence for a year, my mother sent me to the corner store to get milk. I’d never had that chore, and I never would again, because it took me two hours to find my way back. I had the milk, though.
Look at it this way, Anaamika and others: you’ll never be one of those people who panics when they get lost.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way I am incredibly good at getting lost. But I still have nightmares about having to be somewhere for something important (the SAT’s, the GRE’s, my wedding, et cetera), getting lost on the way there, and getting more and more panicked as I drive around trying to find the place. As a result, I will, if possible, always go to any place like that before I need to, when there’s no time pressure, to make sure I know the way.
I totally feel you. I also am in the running for the world’s worst sense of direction. When people give me directions, I have to tell them to be very specific, starting with which way to turn out of my driveway, because “We’re just west of the cross-town expressway.” totally ain’t gonna cut it. And I also reallyreally hate being lost.
We now possess a GPS, and it’s one of the most wonderful things ever invented.
Are we cousins?
Only mine starts with her sons (two of 'em) and then starts on the grandsons. Good thing I was the first-born. My cousin Joey has got to wait awhile before she gets to his name.
I get lost a lot. One time, long before cellphones, I was driving across the US alone. Heading toward Denver, I decided to pull off the interstate to see Scotts Bluff in Nebraska. Then I couldn’t find the interstate. So, I just kept following the road I was on, hoping to come to another town. The road kept getting smaller and smaller; the pavement turned to clay. I knew I was in trouble when I went over the cattle grate and the road became a semi-maintained path across the prairie. So on I go for many miles, running low on gas, car running on prayer and gas fumes, through the world’s biggest cow pasture. Eventually I come to another cattle grate, then the road was paved, then finally I found a huge grain silo with a tiny little gas station. I ask the attendant how to get to Denver. The guy just looks at me, blinks, and asked where I came from. OOOOoooo-kay. He had no idea where Scottsbluff was. I had somehow driven a Chevy Cavalier across some huge cattle ranch and ended up about 150 miles north of Cheyenne, Wyoming. I missed Colorado entirely. :smack:
No, I got it from Lloyd Alexander all right. I just never connected the second half of the name with all the wandering that I inevitably wind up doing.
I once read a book titled The Compass in Your Nose, which stated that most people have a tiny deposit of iron in their skull just above their nose socket. Most people, it went on to say, unconciously learn how to use this deposit as a rudimentary compass.
All I can figure is that someone ran a honking big magnet over my head shortly after I was born.
looks from everyone around me. Last night I pulled a doozy, though. I was talking to my stepsister’s BF and I called him by his brother’s name. The thing is, I can never remember his brother’s name!
I am incredibly good at getting lost. But I still have nightmares about having to be somewhere for something important (the SAT’s, the GRE’s, my wedding, et cetera), getting lost on the way there, and getting more and more panicked as I drive around trying to find the place. As a result, I will, if possible, always go to any place like that before I need to, when there’s no time pressure, to make sure I know the way.