Was it Davey Crockett who once said when asked if he’d ever gotten lost replied “No, I’ve never been lost … but once I was a might bit confused for about 5 days”.
I really enjoy being lost in a foreign city. The key is to not have to be anywhere at any particular time. As the great scientist/warrior/musician/surgeon Buckaroo Banzai once said, “wherever you go, there you are.”
I like to just start walking in an interesting neighborhood and not really pay attention to my route. If I get hungry I find a place to eat with good people walking options and plop down, I usually carry a book and will sit and read, then people watch some more. Finally, I’ll start to wander on back. The trick is not to give a shit where you’re going and just enjoy where you are.
So I’ve been thinking about this and here is my theory.
I don’t have a very good mental map. I never have. My mind doesn’t work like that. I cannot tell, without thinking deeply, whether I am facing east or west.
In my town we are on the Hudson River. I love this. I know the river is east and I navigate accordingly. (It makes it difficult the few times I am on the other side of the river!)
But I can’t go to a new place and remember things easily. It takes several times for a map to fix in my head. Very quickly all of the streets start looking the same.
I wonder if people who are good at the mental navigation enjoy being lost better.
(For more information on the way different people navigate, read Inner Navigation by Eric Johnson).
See post #30.
I was thinking the opposite. I am severely directionally and left/right challenged. I regularly get lost on the floor where my office is located. Since I get lost on a daily basis, I don’t have much choice but to enjoy it or live in a perpetual state of panic.
I agree that there are certain circumstances - unprepared in the wilderness; in a dangerous area of an unfamiliar city - where getting lost is very scary. But most of the time it’s just a matter of wandering until you find something familiar. With a cell phone I always know that I’m not going to get into too much trouble.
I think the difference between enjoying being lost and not enjoying it comes down to how you feel about the unfamiliar. If you’re someone who only feels comfortable in familiar surroundings, then you’re not going to like being lost. But if you enjoy seeing new things and being in unfamiliar places, then being lost is an adventure.
Tease the navigator!
Wandering aimlessly != “getting lost.”
I’ve mentioned in other posts that my family spent time in cities and countries all over the world as a side effect of my husband’s work. Once we felt fairly familiar with the language and could get around the area functionally, we would take ‘road trips’ on the weekend to get out and see the surrounding areas. We’d randomly pick a direction, grab a map or GPS in case of getting unfindably lost, and then just head out. We would stop to check out anything interesting and wherever we’d wind up at the end of the day, we’d stay the night and then head home the next day. Occasionally, even with the map and GPS we’d get pretty lost, but most people we’d encounter were kind and would point us in the right direction. I treasure those little road trips and all the fun and interesting people and things we encountered during them. And so educational for our boys, too, who also still talk about them all these years later.
Getting just a little bit lost, or at least heading out into unfamiliar territory, can be great fun indeed. Just don’t allow yourself to get too uptight about it, stop and ask for help when you need it, and generally all will be well.
By rule you’re not lost unless someone else has to come find you! If you find your way back without being rescued you’re only “temporarily disoriented”.
I tell all the nervous nellies that are with me that if you are too slow, weak, or intellectually impaired to keep up you may well be left behind to die before its all over.
Doesn’t make it fun per se, but it does make it a bit more interesting.
I have almost no mental map whatsoever, unless the sun is rising or setting, east could be anywhere. It’s one of the reasons I get lost so very often. Also, even if I did know where west was, it wouldn’t really help. It’s more the belief that it’ll all work out eventually, which if I’m in a city or in a car on the road, it probably will.
Unprepared in the wilderness is a different story. Getting lost there is not good. (Though I would like to try orienteering someday). But for vacation-y lost like the OP, you don’t really need to know where you are. You need to know how to figure out how to get back to your hotel. So if you have the name of a major landmark near your hotel you can ask for directions to that landmark. If it’s a place with public transportation, learn the name (or if you can’t speak/write the language, copy down the name) of the nearest station to your hotel so you can get back there. Even better, note which bus/train/subway/boat stops there and if you happen across it (or a bus stop for the line), you can just ride to your hotel (or end up at the end of the line, turn around and ride back.)
Yeah, I have to agree about Venice. It’s a beautiful city and all, but it was frustrating navigating all the dead ends and creepy gondola drivers.
Personally, I think people are equating “lost” with “wandering aimlessly”. The first one sucks while the second is fun, so long as I have the means to “un wander” if need be. I view being “lost” as being extremely inconvenient or potentially dangerous.
I don’t mind getting lost, but TheKid can’t stand it. WAYZ is her best friend. It has caused issues in the past - I was driving her up north and the main road was closed. I took a side road to see where it went and she was NOT happy with me. In northern Minnesota it can be 20-30 miles between stop sign towns and she was freaking out that we would never see civilization again. I joked “What’s the worst that could happen? We’ll end up in Canada or North Dakota”. That did not appease her. It was a miserable drive. Add to it, she does not like eating at mom and pop restaurants, which takes a lot of fun out of it for me. For being 21, she’s a major stick in the mud.
In college, I used to hop in the car on a Friday after classes, decide on a destination and drive (hopefully) in that direction. I loved it. Radio blasting, no obligations, always found neat places to stop. I remember finding kinfolk in an incorporated town in Wisconsin - that was cool.
Yeah, well, we’re going to Italy in the fall and the first stop is Venice. I picture us wandering all around all day, taking whatever turns and bridges we can take in order to avoid dead ends. And then, after a lovely dinner at some random restaurant in whatever the hell neighborhood we find ourselves in, trying to find our way back to the hotel as darkness falls, having no clue as to where we are, even though I’ll have a map. This prospect gives me the cold cockles. I presume that ultimately, I could hope to find a cab that would take us where we want to go, but failing that, I’m not looking forward to the “exciting, challenging, fun-filled adventure” that some posters seem to think we’ll have. Me, I’ll be annoyed as hell that I can’t find my way back, I’ll be pissy to my wife, and I’ll probably wreck the first few days of what should be a superb trip. I know - I sound like a real charmer, but that’s my point. Seems like some people are not constituted to enjoying getting “lost,” and I’d like to be able to modify my essential self to be able to do that.
As others have said, a sense of adventure attitude goes a long way, & a good sense of direction helps, too. I was in a foreign city last week, & I knew that I could just reverse myself to get back to a starting point, if necessary; however, taking a different route found me a shortcut to the main square. (Bonus, the first way was on a road that was closed for reconstruction & therefore more desolate.)
Even on a bike at home, when I go exploring, I may not know exactly where I am, but I’m not lost because I know that before I turned, the interstate was a few miles to my right, the river (or mountains) a few miles to the left, & a major road somewhere in front of me. Essentially until I reach one of those, I’m still in the ‘box’ & could find my way out by finding one of the edges. Works in almost all cities as almost all major cities are on at least one river. If you get lost, ask someone to where the river is & you are instantly reorientated.
- Except for Prague. Beautiful city but maddening to navigate. Every street twists & turns about every 50m & they are narrow with 4 story buildings on either side. I’ve never gotten as turned around as there. Found some interesting stuff because of it, though.
Well, first, you can’t find a cab in Venice. There aren’t any cars. There are no cabs. Second, you’ll run into dead ends, because that’s all Venice is, a bunch of dead ends. Even with a map (which it takes a while to figure out, because the city is weird. Beautiful and lovely and amazing, but weird), you’ll run into dead ends and points where you can practically touch exactly where you want to go and not be able to get there.
There are major routes. If you figure out where your hotel is in relationship to those, you’ll be able to find your way back.
Hah! I lived in Prague for a while many years ago, and I love it. Which makes no sense at all, since I mentioned upthread how annoying I think Venice is. I guess that I give Prague a pass since I had so many wonderful times there.
Also, in Prague, it’s just the Old Town. Most the city makes sense. And even in the Old Town, you won’t get stuck, like in Venice, just re-oriented in random ways. I know what you mean by “turned around”. It’s a weird space-warp twilight zone. You enter the Old Town in some direction, proceed in what you think is a straight line, quickly become utterly confused, and then pop out a while later at some random angle, nowhere near where you thought you were, and going in a completely different direction.
Nice one! I have a similar story, I was in Lombok, an Indonesian island, for an intensive language course. I was pretty fluent already, but it was a fun chance to get uni credit for spending a month in a lovely place, and brush up my Bahasa at the same time.
One afternoon (classes were AM only), I got chatting with some locals on a bus, who invited me to their home for a drink. They kept assuring me it wasn’t far, and I had no other plans, so I just went with it. We got off the bus and into a bemo (local minibus/taxi/rideshare vehicle), off the bemo and onto the backs of scooters, (sidesaddle behind the drivers, of course) wending further and further out of Mataram. At one point, our little convoy of scooters took a short cut along the wall at the top of a rice paddy, which sloped in bright green terraces below us.
We got to their home and relaxed for a while on the bale (thatched sitting platform, found outside just about every home in Lombok, like this) drinking tea, then fruit juice, then more tea. Someone killed a chicken. All the neighbours stopped by to say hi. Dinner was delicious. Eventually someone dropped me off at the bus stop where I could get back to my homestay.
I have no idea where I was on a map. But the kindness of strangers meant I wasn’t afraid of that, or intimidated by the idea of finding my way back. I treasure the memory!
We moved to the San Diego area early last summer, and I’m still not entirely familiar with where everything is. Aso, unlike L.A., there is still a lot of open space between many of the settlements (I’m in Escondido, the very tongue of the buckle of the Avocado Belt).
So if I ever get lost in the vicinity, I just turn on Google Navigation or my Magellan and tell it to avoid freeways. Through the wonder of GPS technology, I usually get led past some nice scenery and useful establishments like wineries and roadside produce stands.
Female here – I’ve been to Paris several times, and have yet to buy a map (well, partially – I have a metro map, but everything else is just wandering and guessing).
Going for a wander/being lost depends on my mood, how much time I have in the place, &c.