GPS-ing

In the “old days” either my husband or I would drive and the other would act as navigator when we traveled someplace unfamiliar. Now, just like pretty much everybody else, we use GPS. It’s on phones and in cars and I wonder how we ever got along without it. Try to find the most obscure address in the most remote place, and the global satellites or whoever’s in charge, will be all over it. We were on a family vacation last week and on the way to our rural Vrbo we passed a small, obscure intersection of two small roads with nothing except a drive-thru coffee place which said “Mary’s Corner”. As unremarkable as the intersection was, the phone GPS indeed labeled it as Mary’s Corner. Farther on, we passed a sign next to a parking space at a small cemetery outside a church that said, “Parking Reserved for Mary”. Apparently Mary was a person of some prominence in that area and I hoped that cemetery parking place wasn’t an omen. I like how the GPS authoritatively says things like, “Go through this stop light and turn left at the next one”. Very plain. Very clear. But there’s an oral direction that could be confusing if I weren’t familiar with the particular freeway entrance. It always makes me laugh when I get on I-5 to go north and Siri says, “Use the right lane to keep left.”

Photo of actual sign courtesy of me, Mary Kunkel