GPS Hell - Version Two

When I woke up with my eye swollen shut I should have known it was going to be a suck day.

Evidently, some insect feasted on my eyelid while I lay sleeping, leaving me looking like the loser in the Ali / Frazier fight.

I grabbed some coffee with my dear friend Leah and loaded the car.

I left Northampton, Massachusetts for Newark Airport at 8:30 am, so that I would have time to have lunch with some friends in Westfield, New Jersey before I turned the car in at the Newark Airport.

So setting my GPS for my pal’s home, looking thru one eye, I began my descent into hell.

The GPS was determined to take me through Manhattan and I was determined to  go around it, using the George Washington Bridge to make good my escape.

When really evil people die and go to hell, they wake up driving in Manhattan.   That is evidently where hell really is.    If you are walking in Manhattan on a fall day, you are in heaven.   If you are driving, you are in hell.

You begin to entertain the draconian idea of cleaning out the gene pool and removing the dim ones.

Really, shouldn’t there be actual intelligence tests at the DMV?  Maybe reflex tests and logic tests, because I am convinced many folks are simply too stupid to be piloting several tons of steel across the planet at high speeds.

In any event, the GPS did great until I approached Newark, then it went to hell.   Telling me to turn left here and then stating it had to reconfigure.   This probably happened four times.

I arrived at my friends home an mere forty minutes later than the GPS originally said I would arrive.

We took off for lunch and for some reason I allowed my friends to convince me that we should go in one car…mine.    So now I would have to ferry them home before I drove to the airport, turned in the car, checked in and then endure “security”.

I have no idea why I suspended years of experience and simply went along with it.  But they assured me they were only ten minutes from the airport and it would be no problem.

We had a leisurely lunch and then I drove them all home.   Leaving their home, the GPS told me to turn one way, tho I remembered the way being in the opposite direction.    But again, I suspended my own knowledge and experience and went along with the GPS.

It directed me through the surface streets of every single little village and berg and the city of Newark and it only took me an hour and fifteen minutes to get to the airport. 

Now I was crazed, late, and behaving even more stupidly.   I turned in the car raced to the tram, up two flights of stairs with my luggage.   Then discovered I didn’t have my phone.  

Raced back to the car rental turn in lot and found my phone, which had fallen out of my coat pocket and landed between the seats as I exited the car.

I’m telling you, I feel like some toy God created to keep him amused.

I raced back to the tram, just missed the one that was leaving, and had to wait for the next one, a mere five minutes more.

Check in was a huge line, security was a huge line, they singled me out and had to wipe down my guitar to make certain it wasn’t a nuclear device.   I sprinted to the gate, …and the plane was delayed.

Here’s the lesson.

Follow your ritual on the road.  You know what you need to make the road free of anxiety and stress.   No matter how well meaning your friends and family are, you are the one who does all this traveling and you  know what it takes to make it work for you in the most pleasant way it could be.

Do not let people convince you that you don’t have to follow your own gut feeling about what you need to do.

And only use the GPS when you simply don’t know the way.  

Comments

[Melissa V.]

OMG, Bed Bugs!