Sorry about the silence, I was off on an adventure….travling to London with the kids. We had tons of fun, and more tube rides for our money than I thought possible. And I knew that I wouldn’t get lost anymore, because everything has GPS and if you need directions, there’s an app for that. It did sadden me a little to think my kids will grow up not knowing what its like to not know where you are going, at all times. So we fixed that. They know what it’s like now.

Back in my youth one of the pastimes (after we scraped up enough gas money out of the couch) was to “go for a drive”. The whole point of it was to go in a direction you hadn’t been before, and see what happened. You would stumble upon a truck stop in the middle of nowhere for the best breakfast you ever had, find a hidden creek or a lake and wade into it.  You’d randomly run into places you never knew existed, sometimes with breathtaking appeal. I remember one such drive; we turned a corner to find a whole field of sunflowers, as far as the eye could see, like we’d stumbled into the Wizard of Oz.

Then there were times you got lost and were desperate for some direction, anything, to tell you the way home. I experienced this with a friend as we took an off ramp in L.A., as her car blew a piston and was basically on fire. We ended up in the scariest place I have ever been, where cops immediately came to our rescue.

“Do you girls know where you are?” one said, looking at us with incredulity.

“Someplace I don’t want to be?” I said meekly.
“Yes,” he said. “See that alleyway? They sell women to gangs in that alleyway.” I gulped. If he was trying to scare the shit out of me, he was doing a good job. At this particular point in history, we could have used an app: a “how not to end up in gangland by not taking a random off-ramp” app.

These days, we have the app option, and looking at Google maps before you go stumbling around downtown in a large city might be a good idea. Take a few wrong turns, and sometimes it gets weird, quickly. My husband and his buddy did this recently, looking for a place they thought they knew. They looked around as they passed down the street, noting the neighborhood was deteriorating at an alarming rate. Sure enough, in an alley, a Hells Angel was giving someone a talking to, by grabbing the guy’s ear and shouting into it. Alarming. But not as alarming as turning the corner to see a homeless dude letting a girl photographer take a picture of his enormous penis.

“Don’t look, dudes,” he yelled out, as they passed.

So, there’s that. Better to check the address, maybe.

Directions come in handy. But one of the best trips of my life was made by spinning the globe; stopping it with my eyes closed, pivoting on a pointed finger. We ended up in Sante Fe, driving there with maps and random turns, taking off ramps when it pleased us, noting the signs that said “If you see someone wearing an orange jumpsuit, do not pick them up.”  (We passed a huge penitentiary a few miles later.) We had…adventures. We met people who were out of our ordinary realm of experience. And it never would have happened had we known exactly where we were going.

In London we mostly erred on the side of directions, as there are only so many snacks one can carry and only so many miles little feet can go. We did randomly hop on a bus, only to discover it was heading over a bridge the wrong way, at which point we hopped off at mach ten. The kids got to experience jumping off a double-decker with commando instructions from behind…”GO GO GO!!!,” (A teachable moment about panic). We also got lost in the Heath, London’s incredibly large and maze-like forested slice of idyllic beauty. Several people asked us for directions, which was alarming, because they looked like they belonged there. One woman said, “I think I’ve been walking for hours,” and was dismayed to know we didn’t know where we were either.

“I know where I am!” my husband exclaimed. “This is where I got lost on that run, remember?” (I did. When we lived near the Heath, one day he embarked on a “quick run” and made it home three hours later, sweaty and dirty). ‘Wait, you remember that this is the place you were lost in? Does that help us?” I was getting  testy. It was hot, and the kids were tired, and there were three rice cakes left and some jelly beans held in reserve for bribery. We turned into the forest to get away from the sun, and became lost quickly. Then we stumbled upon something that I would have never seen otherwise. It can only be described as a Grecian temple, with vines and flowers and corridors of cold stone. The kids ran though this little maze, unfazed by any lost-ness. We ran into three women, laughing and talking. They stopped us. “You must smell this flower,” they commanded, and we did, and it was jasmine, filling our senses with it’s heady perfume.   “Thank you, “ I said, needing this beauty, this sanctuary. This is why it’s good to get lost. Granted, fifteen minutes later we sent Dad out to actually find out where we were. I texted him after another 15.

LOOKING AT MATCH.COM

(The Tube’s main advertisement, for single people hoping to find their perfect partner…) and then he showed up, sweaty and out of breath. “I know the way!” he said, smiling. We followed him deeper into the woods, emerging to our destination. We broke out the jellybeans. It could not have been more perfect.