I had a pretty bad day on Friday, as some of you might know by talking with me this past Saturday morning. I had to drive to Oakland for orientation (which was basically 5 hours of paperwork) that should have taken forty-five minutes with good traffic. In hearing about bad California traffic, I gave myself an extra hour and a half of travel time, only to get to my destination thirty minutes late because of one bad direction given to me via google maps. It was literally making my skin crawl to be so late. I’ve never been this late in my life…especially for anything job related.
Luckily, Jason was home to direct me to the correct highway and to my final destination. Thirteen tests and eleven pages of signatures later, I needed to call Jason again for directions to our bank and then home. He was happy to plug away the directions into his iphone and/or computer, but I felt really horrible. I didn’t like depending on Jason so much. I know we’re husband and wife (yadda, yadda, yadda), but being in a new city, I really felt that I shouldn’t have to depend on Jason for getting every single place.
When first moving to Cleveland, I was dependent on Jason for directions, or I just drove around until I wasn’t lost anymore. It’s a world of difference here, though. There are several interstates that are all named pretty similarly (80, 280, 380, 580, 680, 780, 880, and 980). At least in Cleveland there are 5-6 highways that are not really close in name at all. Jason said that I should think of driving through the Bay Area as driving through 3 Clevelands.
After spending 6 hours on the road on Friday for something that should have taken half the time, I was at my wit’s end. I knew I couldn’t be calling my soon-to-be hardworking Google husband every hour when I was lost or to help me fish through the 8 interstate highways and endless state routes. I needed a GPS.
After spending a whole morning researching GPSs online, my wonderful husband and big brother Ahan escorted me to Fry’s (Best Buy kind of pales in comparison to this place). I bought the Magellan 4050. It’s a great device that had the 2 major things I was looking for, 1) bluetooth technology (voice recognition, live traffic updates, handsfree dialing for cell phones), and 2) text to speech directions. I can’t even express how much better I feel traveling with my GPS (I call her Moesha).
It’s great to travel with much more confidence. Jason is not in the least bit obsolete. Along with the great love and companionship, there’s at least 60 pounds worth of atlases on there way to our house right now with hours of knowledge that Jason can’t wait to bestow onto me.
-Ann