Internal navigation went haywire

Sometimes you just make a wrong turn.

I have always prided myself on my sense of direction.

Once, a full nine years after my family had been camping in a town far from home, I was able to find my way to the campground. When I was 11, I was in the back seat of a car. When I was 20, I was intermittently hiking and hitchhiking. But I found the campground.

Just the same, sometimes the compass takes one too many spins. Right becomes left. North becomes south. The map in your head doesn’t match the map in your hip pocket, and ultimately you don’t have a clue where you are.

Part of the problem may be that those of us who grew up in the former Northwest Territory are used to east-west and north-south roads. We like things laid out in a grid.

Toss us into a situation where the roads are based on cow paths (Boston) or trails, like much of New England, and we tend to get confused.

Add a large dose of forest to that, enough to make the landscape unrelentingly the same, and a cloudy day, to make sure the sun is not visible, and we can soon be going around in circles.

Sometimes, it doesn’t even take that much.

Last month, my wife and I found ourselves in Southern California visiting friends. We’d booked a room at a B&B in South Pasadena, close to our great friend Andy Lippman, a former Associated Press bureau chief who has been battling rheumatoid arthritis for several years.

And we figured that as long as we were in the neighborhood, we’d check in with my longtime friend Gayle Williams Stoner. Gayle and I have been friends since kindergarten.

These days, Gayle and her guy Tom own a place called Pasadena Architectural Salvage. If that sounds like it would be a cool shop to visit, you are exactly right.

The place is a treasure trove of doorknobs, face plates, doors, stained glass windows, light fixtures, rusty bits, shiny bits and who knows what. It is a delight for anyone who loves old stuff and likes to browse. For someone restoring an old house, it is an indispensable resource.

The plan was, we’d meet up with Gayle at the shop, follow her to her house, pick up Tom, follow their directions to a restaurant, have lunch, then head back to the house for more conversation and maybe a glass of wine.

After that, we’d meet up with our friend Andy again at the Gamble House, a truly remarkable piece of arts and crafts architecture built by the Gamble family, as in Procter and Gamble soap and stuff.

Piece of cake, right?

Maybe in Indiana or Ohio. Not so much so in Greater Los Angeles.

We found Gayle’s store just fine and had a wonderful tour, followed Gayle back to the house, met Tom, had lunch and enjoyed a glass of Zinfandel over more conversation.

But then it came time to meet up with Andy at the Gamble House.

Saying our goodbyes, we hopped into our rental car, made one correct turn, then — at our first busy intersection — my internal compass evaporated.

We should have turned right. I turned left, with a confidence that would be admirable but for the fact that I was absolutely and completely wrong.

The Garmin navigation system in a beanbag on the dashboard objected, but I pressed on.

These streets looked familiar. Hadn’t we been here before?

Little did I know that most of the streets in Greater LA look familiar. You’ll find block after block that look like other blocks after blocks.

But the Garmin continued to protest.

We were already cutting it close when it came to meeting up with Andy at the Gamble House, and the navigation system kept moving our expected arrival time further and further into the afternoon.

When we pulled over, looking for more specific help, the Garmin tried to send us onto an interstate ramp. I had already survived more Los Angeles interstate driving than I’d ever wanted to experience. So we rejected that advice.

A few minutes later, the problem became clear: I should have turned right when I mistakenly turned left, back about 20 minutes earlier.

Finally, we got turned around in the right direction. But with every block, I still felt we were going the wrong way. Once your internal compass gets confused, it takes a while to set it right.

By the time we got to the Gamble House, Andy had gone home for a nap. We’d connect later for dinner.

But we did eventually get the tour, and it was worth it, even if I did keep confusing right and left, north and south, and up and down.