Turn that way ... no, the OTHER WAY!

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve managed to drive from Toronto to Montreal, to Quebec City, to Lake Placid, to Rochester and finally to Niagara Falls. One of the things that I’ve been meaning to buy whilst we’re away is a GPS unit. Until I actually manage to do so however, we have been reliant on maps and the good old combination of Caroline navigating and me following the instructions.

Now at this point, you’re probably expecting that there’s likely to be some criticism of the navigational portion of that equation, but the reality is that Caroline is actually a great navigator. Its my inner sense of doubt and apprehension that probably gets us into more trouble, because I hate nothing more than the feeling that I don’ t know that I am headed in the wrong direction. And so I would have to say that as many of the u-turns that we’ve enjoyed were my fault as opposed to navigational error and the navigational errors tended more to be the result of a lack of a map of appropriate detail or scale than directional misfortune.

It all came to something of a head last night after a couple of hours of hurried outlet shopping in the US as we tried to find the right bridge to get us across to the Canadian side of the falls whilst paying the least amount of toll possible.

It was about the point that we were trying to head the right way onto the 104 that things went wrong. The main reason they went’ wrong was because again, there wasn’t enough detail on the map and I made an assumption that we needed to go one way and Caroline only looked up to tell me that I should have gone the other way at the point that we were committed to going where we shouldn’t.

Not to worry, you simply take the next exit, get off and then turn around and come back the way that you came. Unless you’re me. Then you get off, get back on and find yourself back on the road that you wanted to be on, but still going in the wrong direction. Another exit fixed that and we eventually found our way back to the point of the first error.

But by this time, Caroline was seeing the funny side of a situation to which I was far from amused, resulting in her being in a fit of giggles and me being, well ‘a grumpy bastard’ probably understates it.

All things come out ok in the wash though and we managed to take a slow, scenic route, run a red light and finally make our way onto the bridge that brought us back to Canada. We even found the hotel.

I still intend to buy the GPS unit though, even if I do get it at a point where I really only have one option to travel by on the way back to Fort McMurray!