I had to get away today. I got lost.
Well, I was trying to be lost. To travel the road I had
not been on before.
Warm day, sunshine, windows down, sun roof open.
I headed south on Platt, trying to continue sough after
roads eneded and had me going west for a while. Barely paved
roads, some dirt. If I found US-23, I would know where I was,
not fitting the objective of getting lost. I ended up in Ohio.
No sign greeting me, but I did quickly notice the difference in
the road signs (caution sign smaller, as where street name signs).
The cars in driveways with Ohio plates where a dead giveaway.
I was only about 4 miles into Ohio, when I found The Roadhouse
and had lunch (pot roast beef sandwich, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn).
Then returned trying to find a different road. Didn't quiite have
a unique path back home, put got home anyway. (duh!).
You ever try to get lost? To find that road you had not been
on before?
58 responses total.
One night, shortly after I moved to Ann Arbor, I went for a walk and just wandered around. After a while, needing a goal, I decided to try to climb to the highest point I could find. I ended up at the sewage treatment plant. Took about 3 hours. That was 13 years ago, and I still haven't forgotten it. It was a powerful experience, but I can't explain why.
In most places, my long rambling walks are in areas that I have enough of a mental map of that I at least have some idea where I must be, even if I'm not somewhere where I've been before. I did do such a long rambling walk in London a few years ago, which eventually wound up at Buckingham Palace. My New York walk stategy when I spent a couple non-consecutive weeks there this summer tended to be to walk until I didn't feel like walking anymore, and then take the subway back to Greenwich Village, where I had started. I ended up walking from 4th Street up to Central Park at one point, but I don't think I ever could have considered myself lost. The streets are mostly a numbered grid.
I have a hard time getting really lost, but whenever I take a trip on the bike, I always try to take routes I have never before traveled.
When I was pregnant with Staci, it was a very hot summer. The only air conditioning we had was in the car. We spent a lot of time in the car. I would either read or stitch on some project. STeve would drive. Damon, age 3, would navigate. They thought it was fun to try to get me lost. We would drive with Damon pointing the direction and picking when and direction of turns. After a few hours STeve would say time to go home,"which way is home, Mommy?" I would look up from book or needlework glance around and point, "that way." I never really paid much attention other than initial direction away from home. Always had STeve drive straight home without much bother and much quicker than the drive out. Damon never got tired of trying to get Mommy lost.
The only way I ever learn my way around any new city is by getting repeatedly lost until I build up some kind of subconscious mental map of how the major streets fit together. Once I have that, I'm never lost for long...I just need to drive until I cross a major street I recognize. Every city has its own confusing features. In Ann Arbor it's how many streets merge, seperate, and change names. In St. Paul, it was the fact that you couldn't follow any straight street in the grid for more than a couple miles before hitting a lake.
I find it hard to get lost in Michigan--things generally run in sensical directions. New Jersey is another story. I suspect there are faster alternatives to every path I take, but I'm afraid to look for them. Every alternate route I've tried has ended in me getting horribly confused and frustrated. No road runs straight out here.
I don't have a sense of direction. So I drive around until I build up a map, much as gull does. I can usually find the cardinal points, from the sun. But I can (and have) gotten lost in a building, most recently Zingerman's Next Door, sitting in the Kid's Room. (I finally figured out where that room is, in relation to the building and outside.)
I knew the way t omy friends place but not how to get back from there ..so while it took me 20 minutes to reach (on foot ) it required full 1 and 1/2 hrs to come back ..and on top of it I got caught in the rains while returning. Talk about bad sense of direction.
It's harder to do downstate, but I did this while living in Marquette. I would go for long drives about twice a week, and I always found nifty stuff way out in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes it was really spooky if it was nighttime, but I loved those drives. I never got truly lost, but I often ended up nowhere near where I thought I was. :) I remember the time I realized I was in Wisconsin and about four hours from Marquette. Heh.
Last week I went to a meeting in Kalamazoo, not having been there before. I had to drive between where I stayed in a motel and where the meeting was on campus. I deliberately took a different route each time I had to go back and forth. I had looked at the map going there, so "internalized" the lay of the land, and could dead-reckon from that. I do enjoy exploring areas this way - even getting "lost" a few times (in housing developments, usually). I explore caves the same way. By noticing things along the ways - and having a moderately good sense of direction, or at least sensitivity to clues to directions (I have been known to look out the window driving at night to check stars) - it is hard to get significantly lost.
wellll, i coldn't recommend random travel for spelunkers, however, on the earth's surface i hoist a toddy to tpryan for his adventure!1 what fun! what fun yoo must have had! what a thrill to get somewehre and tehn find out where you happen to be adn what surprises that location may offer. oh, btw, yes, i ahve done the same - multiple times. leisure time and its investment in newness is a throughly refreshing activity. i think we can both recommend it. cheerrzz to tpryan!
My parents stay at a cement factory colony in almost the middle of nowhere in India. To reach the place, you can take a shortcut from the main road that goes thru open barren land and a few hamlets. In the night time once you take the detour from the main road, the only light you can see is that of the factory about 20 miles away. So me and my friend were driving down from the city one day and took the detour. For almost one hour we ran around in circles in complete darkness trying to head towards the lights of the factory. The open land has so many dirt tracks criss-crossing that which one to follow was a confusion. Driving straight wasn't an option with paddy fields in the way. Finally, we woke up some villagers at 2AM and asked for the way. Again after getting lost a couple of times, we managed to reach the place with the fuel almost emptied out. Heading towards the lights sounded easy but doing it was much tougher than we thought!!!
Today, I am headed to one of the three turtle beaches in Oman. The drive is through open country with good possibility of getting lost on the way. Unlike India where you find villages every few miles, this place has no villages or nomads for several tend of miles. So wish me luck!! :)
I've often set out without knowing where I'm going, but I can't recall ever successfully getting lost. Nowadays I don't expect to do much of either. You can't get lost on the road system here because there's just not enough road to do so. And getting lost off the road system, either on the water or in the forest, would be pretty likely to be fatal.
I often go for a drive at lunch time, and see how far I can get from work while returning within a reasonable time. My sense of direction is poor so this can be adventurous. When I worked in Farmington Hills, I took a 2 1/2 hour lunch by accident a couple of times. That was uncomfortable as my employer at the time was tight about the lunch schedule.
Re #6: I have no problems with getting lost in rural Michigan, where roads are usually straight and follow compass directions and you can see landmarks from a long way off. I get lost very easily in cities, though. (Granted, in the U.P. the roads aren't straight, but up there there just aren't that many roads and there are often prominant geographical features to use as guides.) Actually, I'd venture to say I've never been *truely* lost in rural Michigan. There have been times when I wasn't sure exactly where I was, but I pretty much always have known what general direction to head in. Re #9: I used to do that too, when I was living in Houghton. It was a lot of fun. Often I'd look at the topo maps in the library and pick some spot that looked interesting, then try to get there. Places at the end of long gravel or dirt roads were ideal.
When I lived in Springfield, Mass., I was puzzled by a diagonal line of lights visible in the night sky, seemingly a half-mile or so away, as if on the side of a very large building. But no matter where I was in the city, the lights never changed appearance -- they never looked any closer or father away, the angle never changed. WTF? Nobody seemed to know what they were. So, one night I decided to go find the mysterious lights for myself. I aimed the car straight at them and started driving. I went through neighborhoods, across parking lots, down expressways, always keeping the lights directly in front of me. They never changed! Finally, I found myself driving downhill on a narrow dirt road, through a wooded area. At the bottom of the hill, the road ended at the Connecticut River. And there, straight ahead on the other side of the river, was that line of lights, no closer than it had been when I started. At that moment, it finally sunk into my thick skull that I was *obviously* looking at something very big and very far away. In fact, it was obviously the line of lights on the ski trail near the summit of Mt. Tom, a big (1,400 feet or so) hill that I had gone skiing on many times. From where I was sitting on the river bank, it was still probably ten miles away. Feeling very foolish, I had to back the car back up the river bank to the main road, only to realize that I had no idea where I was. It took me forever to get home.
It's next to impossible to get lost in Columbus. Drive long enough in ny direction and you're bound to hit I71, I70 or I270. Sometimes even 315. Once you're there, you can get home. Or I can get home
Berlin used to work that way, too. No matter which way you went, you'd eventually get to the wall.
I usually don't get lost, mostly because I prepare with maps and directions ahead of time. Plus I've got a pretty good sense of space. Still, when I was in Philadelphia this summer I got somewhat lost at one point. I'd gotten directions and had a map, but between three different sets of number systems (local highway/route numbers, freeway exit numbers, and obsolete/old freeway exit numbers from construction changes) I ended up going a pretty good distance on the wrong road. Took a fair amount of map work to figure where I was, and how to get where I wanted to be.
We take maps along biking but just wander around sometimes when on foot.
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One of my most memorable experiences of being "lost" was on a nonstop (except for fuel) trip to California from Michigan with some friends. I was driving through Kansas City after midnight and took a wrong turn on the freeway and ended up crossing the Rockies on US-50 rather than the planned I-70. Of course, we knew where we were, sorta, but the route from Salida to Grand Junction, where we rejoined I-70, on a moonless night, in the wee hours, included some of the most desolate several hours I have ever experienced driving, with only a few lights visible at great distance (sometimes none at all), really no sense of the surrounding dessert or mountains - just blackness - and also no other cars for hours at a time.
re22: "and then the alzheimer's caused me to poop in my
britches which nova used to draw me a map to the
underground poop-school in the forbidden zone where
i met many other neurologicallympaired members
of the NRA who had a really neat A-BOMB!"
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I think I have a fairly poor sense of direction, but I can read maps and use logic. I also miss turns, and don't have a good memory, so I find I have to get lost in an area several times (and find out what's on all the wrong turns) before I really understand an area. I generally have to be able to visualize things in term sof N/S/E/W to really understand it right.
Re 22: Tod, did you just find a website full of movie scripts rewritten first-person?
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Sort of lost--but not: Whenever I would leave Mason, MI, to drive to Lansing, I never felt that I was going the right compass direction. Each time I had to force myself to follow the road signs, feeling that I was going away from my destination rather than towards it. I never cared for the feeling, even though I was never surprised to arrive at Lansing.
I hardly ever get lost but this spring, I took the dogs to a new nature preserve with a lot of trails that make no sense. There are forks in the trail all over the place. I realized after a while that I didnt know the way back. I wasnt too worried because this is SE Michigan after all and if I kept going in one direction I would eventually find a road. I walked for a while but was still lost. It was starting to get dark and I was a little worried about that. I noticed that my old dog had stopped sniffing and peeing on everything and was walking with purpose. I figured, what the heck. I just let her pick the way. It was her dinner time so she was highly motivated. Darn it if we werent back at the car in 10 minutes by the most direct route. good dog!
perhaps being raised it eh country - on a farm - ahs resulted in my having (what i presume is 'inate') sense of directin n/w/s/e and teh *only* (singularity) time it has failed me was upon introduction to the peoples' repubic of ann arbor! all my compas directins were 90 degrees askew - left - counter-clockwise! maybe taht explains all this leftist crud i encounter. seriously folks, i was baffled for the first time in my life. i'm over it now (excpet for hte 1-ways becoming 2-ways) but there remain some artifacts! i recognize them though. ,
My sense of direction in Ann Arbor was often 180 degrees off. I think this was largely because South of the river, where I grew up, South was uphill and North was downhill.
I can certainly understand that. I have to mentally override my "towards the water is west" reflex, product of growing up in western Michigan..
re:31
*hic*
Re #30: Lynne's experience reminds me of Gus Van Sant's "Gerry", the ultimate "getting lost" movie. Casey Affleck and Matt Damon should've had a dog with them. Or maybe it reminds me more of "The Blair Witch Project"...
re#32 - You know, that happens to me in both Ann Arbor *and* Ypsilanti and I have no idea why
I used to have a pretty bad "uphill must be North" thing in Ann Arbor, developed while growing up somehow. When I came back in 93 it took a while to get my compass directions sorted out. Bird Hills park is a pretty good place to get lost. Back in high school we used to go cross-country skiing in there and it was always an adventure. After a few years of living right near there again I finally got to where I could find my way around even despite the drastic seasonal changes.
I got lost in Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia once. Its a big city, and I got off the subway at the wrong stop in the wrong neighborhood (turns out two subway stops on different lines had very similar names) Pretty interesting to walk around when there are no signs in english. I ended up in the opposite end of town from where I was trying to go, but I walked through some really interesting neighborhoods, the kind where tourists would rarely go. There are sometimes benefits to getting lost. I was lost until I found another subway station on another line and followed the stops back to the center of the system.
Sounds like when a friend and I got lost in Shanghai, except the subway wasn't very extensive at that point. I'd really love to visit Malaysia, if I ever get back over to that part of the world again.
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/cues "Smokin'"
I took a wrong turn in Tijuana once. I realized when instead of trying to sell me worthless trinkets, people on the street started trying to sell me "very nice girl, $15." I got out of there, fast.
why?
Coz he wanted trinkets.
funny, the word *trinkets* has never sounded like the description of an STD symptom until just now...
If you think trinkets are painful, wait 'til you wind up with knick-knacks..
ew! don't be so GROSS!
adn taht doesn't even begin to compare with bric-a-brac ! OhMy!
The worst is kitsch! Ugh. Especially when you get kitschy in the middle of the night..
Man... Christmas is coming.
re resp:5 --- if you think Ann Arbor has lots of streets which "merge, separate, and change names", you should come to Pittsburgh. . . .
Tho're whores named Ann Arbor. in joke. (chin choke)
Christ Comes at Mass? I shouldn't have stopped going to St. Thomas...
Is that a particularly spunky church?
AAHAHAHAH< GOOD WORDPLAY< GUYS
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resp:54 Very good. ;)
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