Earlier this week, I paid a visit to Midland, Ontario. The Askennonia Senior Centre had invited me to do a keynote speech for the annual Veterans’ Luncheon there. Not a problem, except that the Bruce Peninsula is not a region of the province through which I travel often. I wasn’t familiar with the roads. To make matters slightly more challenging, travelling up Highway 400 and in search of Hwy 93 (the route to Midland) that day I suddenly faced a problem.
“Exit to Hwy 93 closed,” the sign read. “Follow detour signs.”
That’s OK, I thought. I figured I could just follow the construction signage and I’d be fine. But when I turned off Hwy 400 and looked for those orange temporary route signs with the black “D” on them, of course, there were none. As it happened, I hadn’t thought to pack a map and I rarely use a GPS, preferring to follow my nose for direction.
As handy as those global positioning systems seem to be, these days, I find them too often unreliable. What’s more, I find those who use them become so dependent on them that they never pay attention to landmarks and by the time the GPS has totally failed, they’re totally lost. Case in point. A couple of years ago, I conducted one of my scouting trips to Europe; I was planning my later group trip leading a tour to Eastern Europe.
My trusty sidekick this test run was a terrific guide I know from Italy, Rene Thied. Now, Rene is a GPS junkie. He relies on the device from the moment he drives from a parking lot to the moment arrives at his destination and turns off the car ignition. Anyway, at this point in our travels through Poland, we had set out from Krakow to Warsaw, a daylong trip.
As usual, when we were leaving Krakow that day, he keyed in the address of our destination, our hotel in Warsaw.
“It’s on Pope John Paul II Street,” he said.
“Calculating. Calculating,” the GPS voice began repeating.
I repeated to Rene, my now standard retort about the efficacy of these GPSs and when the calculation seemed to stall over our destination in Warsaw, I added “Maybe this GPS is haunted by the ghost of Adolf Hitler.”
Anyway, off we went, northbound on some of the worst highway I think I’d ever seen. The Polish highway department – seriously underfunded between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the fall of the Eastern Bloc Communist states in 1990 – was clearly struggling to keep up with the other European Union nations. Hours later we came to the outskirts of Warsaw. However, instead of heading downtown toward our hotel destination, our GPS directed us off to the northwestern part of the city.
Finally, as the skyline of Warsaw seemed to be fast disappearing in our rear-view mirror, I wondered out loud to Rene where we might be headed. Trusting the GPS to the end, he drove our rented car to a street called Pope John Paul II, except that it was in a suburb of Warsaw still under construction. The city authorities, it turned out, had named two streets after the famous Polish pope. And we were lost. I repeated my nickname for the GPS, which Rene didn’t appreciate. Still, it was my nose that led us back into the city to the original John Paul II Street where our hotel was located.
It’s been like this (fortunately) for me all my life. I remember when my parents, my sister and I used to drive through Buffalo en route to visiting relatives in Maryland. Whenever we entered what my dad referred to as “the Buffalo no man’s land,” he would turn to me like an automatic pilot and say: “OK, Ted, lead us through this maze, please.”
And I would. I always seemed to have an eye and a nose for directions and whether it was Buffalo or Warsaw, I always found the way through.
But the other day – en route to Midland, Ont. – was a bit different. I was off a major highway, looking for non-existent detour signs to direct me and on the verge of panic at being nearly lost. However, in addition to my innate directional skills, I had a Plan B. A few kilometres along the detour route, I did what no other red-blooded Canadian male would ever think to do. I stopped and asked for directions. And it worked. I took in the information, made the quiet calculations in my head and came up with a route to my destination. I arrived on location on time.
I had used the best global positioning device on the planet – the knowledge of a local resident.