Getting From Point A To Point B … With Help

By John Addyman  |  john.addyman@yahoo.com

 

When my wife and I had been married three years, we left our dachshund at the kennel and took what we planned as a two-week honeymoon to New England, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.

I drove. My wife navigated.

Before we left, we had stopped at the AAA Club in Scranton and picked up our AAA Trip Tik for the journey. We also had a Rand-McNally road atlas and maps of New England states.

As I drove, my wife told me where to go, something she developed a real affinity for, based on how often she did it. Everything seemed so organized.

Today, we wouldn’t think of taking all that stuff. We have smart phones. We punch in where we want to go and Siri gets us there, more or less.

Traveling with Siri is worry-free. As long as she keeps talking to us. As long as she doesn’t get tempted by the view or flora and fauna and chooses a much more scenic route for us.

My wife and I have the same iPhone 12s and she is much more proficient in using hers. She uses it all day long and has all kinds of apps on the thing. Most of the time, I have no idea where my iPhone is.

People ask, “Where’s your phone?”

“I don’t know,” I say. ‘I had it a while ago.”

“Why don’t you carry your phone around with you?” people ask.

“Someone might call me,” I say. “I’ve got things to do. When I’m ready to be bothered, I’ll grab my phone.”

But way back in our honeymoon days, there were no such things as iPhones to help us along the way, thus all those maps and atlas books.

What happened on that trip is that we abandoned the Trip Tik for a time, as full of information as it was, because it was just too many pages to fool with. My wife pulled out one map and we used that to get us where we were going.

Now before you get a picture in your head of my wife sitting next to me with the map open on her lap, guiding me like a pathfinder through the wilderness, let’s get real. She had her coffee. She had her book. She had her glasses and the map. The radio was on. The birds were singing.

We talked about the places we were driving by.

And sure as Pennsylvania has championship potholes, we got lost. When the wife was attentive to the map, her directions were spot on. When she got interested in the book, we were lucky we didn’t drive into the Atlantic.

It didn’t help that because of all the neat stuff on the reverse sides of the Trip-Tik maps, we got interested in waterfalls and decided that to keep costs low, we’d avoid the tourist traps but check out every free thing on the route and that included a whole lot of waterfalls.

Did we take a lot of photos of all those waterfalls? Hell, no.

But there were occasions, a couple of times a day, when we tracked down a waterfall, stopped to look at it, got back on the road and realized pretty quickly that we were lost. Even at my young and tender age, I could get persnickety and overexcited when I lost control of a situation, like knowing where the heck we were.

My wife reacted as any sweet young bride would.

“Stop being a jerk, John,” she would say. “We’re not lost; we just don’t know where we are.”

After a couple of days of this, we decided on a new strategy. We decided to stay at Wyndham hotels and we’d call ahead and get directions. Once we found that hotel and stopped for the day, we’d make reservations for the next Wyndham hotel, about 200 miles ahead of us. And we’d get directions again. It worked great. We were organized, had a goal each day and set aside plenty of time to see the waterfalls and stray from the path just a little to catch another free site. The reward? A lot of lobster dinners and lobster thermidor and lobster rolls for lunch.

Move forward to today and when we take our annual summer trip back to Pennsylvania and Maryland, we just bring the iPhones. For a couple of years, neither of us could get our phones to provide audible directions. Instead, my wife would key in the driving directions and read them off to me as we went.

Now, before you start saying to yourself, “This guy is helpless,” let me assure you that you’re absolutely correct. I only figured out how to get the out-loud directions in the last six months or so, but it’s still a crapshoot every time I ask Siri for help: I’m not sure I’ll get what I want.

Two years ago, we were on our way from the Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland to Gettysburg National Battlefield in Pennsylvania and Siri wasn’t happy with us, we found out. On a map (we had one, this time) we were convinced it was a pretty straight ride over nice highway.

But Siri had other ideas. On that day she made sure we saw more farms, horses, cows, Amish buggies, empty two-lane roads and people staring at us curiously on a five-hour trip that should have taken two hours. We wondered if a solar flare had lit up Siri’s hair.

And this is where my wife has a bone to pick with Siri. My wife feels we place too much trust in our friendly computer guide.

“I wish we would have a map with us when we travel,” she said. “Because when we run into a detour or a road closure, Siri runs home to Mama and sends us off into Lord knows where. If we had a map with us, we could at least figure out where we were.”

Between the yesteryears of using maps and using iPhones today, we had mobile navigation systems from Garmin and Magellan. They were fine until we missed a turn or got distracted by a waterfall and suddenly a voice would tell us, “Redirecting” or “Reconfiguring.” And when we heard that, my wife and I would say “Uh-oh!” to one another. Sometimes “redirecting” would lead us to a location, far, far away on some roads that nobody but the software knew about.

We’ll be taking a vacation this summer and we’ll have our phones with us. And a map or two.

So if a red car with two senior citizens ends up in your driveway and the driver is looking one way and his passenger is looking the other, be patient: It’s us.

And you’re welcome to tell us where to go…because we don’t have a clue.