I’m sorry if my earlier comment seemed a little snarky, El_Kabong. It’s just that the line “you’ve been lost” in the OP reminded me of the times that some fool who couldn’t follow a map to their own bathroom or step-by-step instructions on how to wipe their ass told me I was lost.
A girlfriend I had a few years ago got into an absolute panic one time because there was a detour. I had to turn left instead of going straight so I just took the next right on a parallel street until past the construction. A quick right then left got us right back on track. She got increasingly hysterical even after we were back on course. When we pulled up in front of our destination it took a while to convince her we were there even though she could see it right out the car window. Then she was, at the same time, in awe of me and pissed that I had “put her through that”. It was like she thought we were going to end up in some dark, lonely swamp and be devoured by dragons. In downtown Dallas.
Makes me wonder how her ancestors survived long enough to breed.
Oh, no worries. Like I said, I’m just bemused by people blindly following directions without a clear concept of their position, objective and route. Hell, just before I logged on here tonight, I read an item on Yahoo! News concerning a group of tourists in Utah who managed to get themselves stranded on a nearly impassable road that ended at a sheer cliff, and had to be rescued, because they were blindly following a GPS. I guess we’ll be hearing a lot more of these stories.
My husband and I do something close to that at times. We do “let’s see where this road goes” side trips around the Chicago suburbs, no maps or GPS in the car. My husband has a great sense of direction so we’re not worried about finding our way back. Even on gloomy days - for some reason he tends to end up in Joliet when he gets lost on those days, so our joke is “but we know how to get home from there, so we’ll be fine!”
It is! It’s not always about the destination. I need to get out and do it again sometime soon…gas prices be damned. The last time I ended up in the mountains and found some cool antique stores and some breathtaking scenery.
Do you say ‘call it.’ in a vaguely menacing way to hapless passengers?
Regarding those new-fangled GPS gizmos, I read a story recently that in England truck-bridge accidents have been soaring, since the drivers blindly trust their units and jam their lorries into the low clearing… :smack:
I do it without the coin. There’s a bunch of very interesting Romanic churches in Italy that I would never have found if I’d been going where the guide told me to! Grab the car first thing in the morning, go driving at random, take the map out only at lunchtime (either to help me find an eatery or after lunch, to find my way back).
We were going from San Juan Capistrano (the one of the swallows fame) to Ventura, CA. It’s generally a north-west drive.
My mother went N on 55, but instead of turning west on 91, she went east. Everyone had fallen asleep, and she somehow didn’t notice that she was at one point going through a big empty spot of about 8 miles or more (she’s probably almost never driven this stretch), and only noticed something was wrong when she hit Riverside, about 20 miles away.
Unfortunately, this soon played into a big blowup between my parents, because the moods created brought up old issues, and on Christmas Eve!. Urg.