The Agony of Getting Lost

Madeline is away on a weekend long retreat with her youth group.  It should be a fun time and hopefully a very good experience for her.  She's enjoyed every retreat she's been on in the past year, so I'm sure this one will be every bit as good as the others.

Getting to the retreat, however, was a different story.  I don't particularly like to drive to places where I don't know the way without using directions.  I'd much rather know exactly where I'm going.  I chalk it up to my type A control freak personality.  I need that feeling of knowing where I'm going otherwise I feel nervous and on edge.  I don't like the unexpected.

Minutes before taking Madeline to her retreat I checked the email that was sent out to the parents to get the address.  I popped it into my Waze app and we were ready to go.  Along the thirty-five minute drive I saw a lot of places I remembered from last year, and then I started noticing that places I recalled from the route I took last year weren't along the route.  I figured it was just Waze taking me a different more efficient way since there were three different ways to get there when I checked it out on google maps.  Then after missing a turn and irritating the drivers behind me, we arrived at our "destination"  a place that was clearly not the retreat house and looked like a decidedly not nice area of the not so nice area where we were headed.  Oh joy!

So I had Madeline dial up the youth minister to find out why we arrived somewhere totally different.  And that's when she tells me, It's 8th Street spelled out E-I-G-H-T-H.  So once I typed it in to Waze we were there in about two minutes.  But it was enough to put me completely out of my comfort zone and send my stress level way up.  When I got home I just had to look at the email and the letter that was sent out and each of them had the address listed with the number for the street.  Gah! Either way, I was destined to wind up at the wrong place today.  But honestly, what kind of town has streets like Eighth and 8th both followed by street, or Sixth and 6th?  That's just asking to cause a lot of confusion.  I wonder how many people that don't live in the town get confused when they have a bunch of streets named like this.  And even better is it's not like these streets are far apart.  They're minutes apart and who knows, they may even intersect.  It's not like the little five mile long island I grew up on where there was a Pine Avenue in one town and five minutes away there was a Pine Street.  People got those confused at times, but they actually had different names and were in different towns.

I think it goes without saying, but getting lost today did not help me to relax at all.  I'm determined to not get lost on Sunday when it's time to pick her up.