Missed Turns

What’s one of my favorite things about traveling with Genevieve to unknown cities for hockey tournaments – it’s the missed or wrong turns.

Even with maps and Tom-Toms (GPS) I am sure of one thing on every trip we take together; there will be at least one missed turn, at least one time in which we will make a loop-de-loop as I call it.

Our journey to Brampton was pretty low-key, we arrived at the hotel with no problems.  It was almost eight in the evening and we still hadn’t ate dinner. She wanted to go somewhere where she could watch the hockey game (go figure) and picked Kelseys as her top choice.  I didn’t plug it into the Tom-Tom, I had done a quick search on yahoo.ca before we left and the directions seemed simple enough.  With a quick glance I thought the step-by-step directions would be all I needed so I only printed the steps (trying to be green and not waste paper or printer-ink.)

After two right turns, as listed on the directions, the directions (while driving) just didn’t make sense to me. I thought the restaurant was much closer, so I pulled off into a strip mall area and plugged the address into the Tom-Tom which still sent us in the same direction we were heading. 

The next right turn we started laughing because we ended up on the same major road we had taken off the highway to go to the hotel, with bumper-to-bumper traffic we realized we had just done a huge circle. And then we laughed even more when we thought of WWDD (What Would Dad Do) he would have been cursing a blue streak by now.  It ended up the restaurant was only about a block-and-a-half from our hotel.  Through this adventure we discovered/realized that from numerous streets in the Toronto suburbs you just can’t do a left turn, on major roads left turns are not frequent, often your only option is to turn right. Left turns are only allowed at major intersections with lights. We laughed even more on the way back to the hotel because what took us 30 minutes to get to our destination only took us a few minutes for the return trip.

We had a few other mishaps during our weekend, a GPS is great for locating a restaurant based on an address but sometimes a little misleading when you can see the restaurant but the address has no entry way from the road you are on, in our book just another reason for a loop-de-loop.

My lesson to Genevieve during this trip was that in life we will make a few wrong turns, a few wrong choices, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. It doesn’t mean we need to stress out, there is no need to fall apart or meltdown. It just means we need to do a loop-de-loop and follow a different path.  With a few extra turns, a few extra steps we can still arrive at our destination. In life there will always be a few learning curves and they don’t have to be crushing, they don’t have to be negative.  Life in my book is always meant to be an adventure.

As common in many of our trips together, by the end of our stay we got really good at navigating around our little area of Brampton. We mastered the learning curve and found the short-cuts, the side streets to navigate that same journey that took 30 minutes the first night to only take a few minutes in the end.

And, through it all I still chuckle, because if I just would have done it the old-fashioned way, asked for directions from the hotel staff, instead of relying on the GPS or map directions, we might have shortened that first trip right off the bat. There are days I think old-school, no electronics, doesn’t really get the credit it deserves.