google maps

this last weekend was Thanksgiving … which we did not celebrate due to the fact that first of all we were not thankful, secondly we cancelled and lost money on a very much anticipated vacation to Austin, thirdly our family was in three different locations and fourthly one member broke his collarbone…

so we have postponed Thanksgiving until the real one… the American one… the one with football, parades, dog competitions and the anniversary of the farmer’s vasectomy …

I spent the weekend in Calgary with the curly haired son… at a hockey tournament… which leads me to chat about Google Maps…

before Google Maps hit the scene we had to rely on directions, paper maps from gas stations, landmarks and a sense of which way is north… this means that I used to leave my hotel heading to a rink for one of my kid’s hockey games with a 30 minute ‘wiggle room’ in case Mom got lost…

or in a case of my son breaking his collarbone at a rink… I most definitely would not have driven him to the hospital on my own… but now, I confidently type in “Alberta Children’s Hospital” and a lovely lady’s voice takes me right to Emergency…

  

the only issue I have with Google Maps (and don’t take this the wrong way… I want it to stay… I need it to stay) is that I have no sense of where I am or what direction I am heading…

I usually am listening to an Audiobook and get frustrated when ‘she’ interrupts it with comments like ‘take your next right’ or ‘do a legal u-turn’…  hard to really get into a book with her always interrupting…

when I was in high school, we lived in Airdrie and if I wanted to go to a gym or movie in Calgary my dad would draw me a hand written map… with a pen… on paper… and then to get home I would have to figure out how to go backwards on the map he had drawn… luckily for me I was pretty gifted and that didn’t take me too long to figure out… but I cringe to think of today’s teenagers deciphering such primitive methods of travelling…

so when I got home from Calgary on Sunday… I drew a map for the farmer to give him an idea of how lost I got and where it all went wrong…  I turned a 4 1/2 hour rather straight trip into just over a 5 hour back-woods experience…

and this is how it happened…  I trusted Google Maps to get me out of Calgary… on Ethan’s phone because mine was giving me issues… then he made me say ‘Balzac’ twice when we got to the off ramp for ‘Balzac/Kathryn’ and I got mad at him and told him I didn’t need Google Maps anymore and was fine on my own…

I got cocky… I felt like I could make this drive in my sleep… (Google is going to make that happen for me)… I felt like three days previous I had just driven here and could take the same way home… mistake…

we end up missing a turn and heading out on Township Road 262…  whenever you are on a gravel/dirt trail that is a ‘township road’ you are in a bit of a pickle…  we snaked our way through southern Alberta on this… coming across some Mexican hunters and sheep crossing the road… at this point I said to Ethan ‘turn Google Maps back on’…  and then we heard her sweet voice… leading us out of our confused 30 km/hour debacle and taking us to Drumheller…

we had a pee break in Drumheller (note the yellow rain drop sign is for pee breaks on my map)… a bite to eat and headed out towards Dorothy…  beautiful drive as the sun was setting in the West I believe…

and then came the long Saskatchewan part of the drive… which included two more pee breaks and added to that the constant smell of fart in the vehicle…  not a town or bathroom in sight and I knew we were in for a fart smell for quite some time…

while I was occupied rolling my window down for air while trying to listen to the Blue Jays game I didn’t realize that Ethan had turned off Google Maps once again and I was on my own…  this led to me not turning where I needed to turn again and taking another little ‘diversion’ on the way home…

I even got lost going into Eatonia …. missed the turn for the town and hit a giant puddle that engulfed my vehicle… had to make a legal u-turn in the middle of the gravel road… head back and actually go through Eatonia… turn at Glidden and home free…

well, until I hit the muddy roads heading towards my farm and just about hit the ditch…

which is a great feeling in October when you are trying to finish harvest before Halloween…

so if you were looking for a Thanksgiving meal post… visit back here at the end of November and I’ll have an American thankful food related post for you…