Finding out just where he's going

Where the heck were we?
I had no idea.
But I knew that eventually I’d get us where we were going.
One of the unexpected consequences of GPS technology is that while we usually find our way, we often have no idea where we are.
In this case, it was somewhere in Charlotte, N.C.
We’d driven down for our niece Susan’s wedding to a very nice young guy named Richard. And we’d taken Connie’s car for two reasons: It gets better mileage than mine and it has a GPS (global positioning system) unit.
The GPS directions have proven invaluable in Boston, where many of the older streets began life as cow paths and make little sense to anyone today other than cows.
So we headed off to Charlotte, confident that we’d find our way and equally sure we wouldn’t know where we were all the time.
For about the first 200 miles, we didn’t turn the unit on.
GPS units tend to be a little simple-minded when it comes to charting a course, and we had already decided that we wanted to take U.S. 35 southeast out of Dayton, Ohio, rather than clock endless miles on the Interstate system.
Had we turned the unit on in our driveway, we would have been arguing with a computer — and a computerized voice — for nearly four hours.
Once we activated the unit, which my wife has for some reason dubbed Evangeline, things went pretty smoothly.
That is, until we approached Charlotte and plugged in the address of our hotel.
It was on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
But the GPS unit — apparently an old school model from before the civil rights movement — had never heard of such a place.
Eventually, we figured out that Second Street was the pre-MLK name and found our way.
More helpful were calls from my sister Louise, who was already there.
Just the same, as we approached our destination, I wondered out loud about ignoring the advice from the computer and following directions from the sibling with the worst sense of direction in the family.
The good news was that we got there, and Louise was vindicated. Evangeline, if she had any pride at all, should have been ashamed of herself.
The bad news was, our driving wasn’t over.
As soon as we’d dumped our suitcases in the room, we were off to the rehearsal dinner.
Trusting the GPS, but also following a printout of directions provided by the groom’s family, we set out.
It was dark by now, and Charlotte’s an unusual city, the product of extraordinary growth over the past couple of decades. Everything seems new.
Streets routinely change names. And getting from point A to point B may just involve a whole bunch of the rest of the alphabet in between.
Still, I grabbed the wheel and we set out.
Did I know where I was?
Not on your life.
Did we get there?
Of course.
But the next morning, getting ready for the wedding, I found myself looking at the map and the printout of directions and remembering the GPS advice.
By my calculations, we had first gone north, then east, then southeast, then west, then south, then west again, then north again.
No wonder we were a little confused when we arrived.
But we proved again one of the verities of out-of-town weddings: You don’t really need to know where you are to have a good time.[[In-content Ad]]