To accurately navigate to your destination and change it based on certain preferences (ie avoid tolls or highways, etc) then you need to have a working understanding and knowledge of the area. I thought I did. As you will soon find out, I was wrong.
It was Winter Break and I had just gotten a free table and chair set from one town over with my sister. There was a reason why they were free - they were falling apart and one was even missing parts, but college students don't mind when things are free. Soon these chairs and tables would me victimized by vandalism - my house-mates would decorate them with crude graffiti.
After getting these "chairs," or connected pieces of wood, we were going up to my new school that I had transferred to. I had just gotten an off-campus apartment, where it would be the first time I'd be living in my own place (with house-mates) away from home. Woohoo for independence!-ish (my parents were still well within reach and were paying for my place).
The new school was closer and I'd been there a number of times. I was driving a bit of a gas guzzler (back when my car still managed 10-11 miles to the gallon versus it's now 5-6 miles to the gallon) and I'm already cheap so I wanted to use routes that minimized tolls and still maintained the shortest distance.
This meant taking a couple extra highways, but in the end I figured I'd pull ahead at least a few cents. And those few cents matter! You know what I'm talking about, if you've ever driven an extra mile or two to go to a gas station with slightly cheaper gas. And indeed everything worked out, I made it to my destination with little to no problem and pretty quickly too.
You've probably figured out at this point that the problem obviously wasn't the going to my new apartment, it was getting back from it.
My sister and I unloaded my table and chairs and set them up in the living room, making them look operational, and began to head back. At first, everything was going well. The first road was a toll road, but it was essentially unavoidable. I had to be on that road for 45 miles, over half of the journey, and that all went well.
I took my exit. My exit left me with a choice. Nothing so dramatic as the blue pill vs the red pill (if you haven't seen The Matrix, stop reading my blog and go watch it, now!). I could stay on the highway that I just got on, I could transfer to a new highway and stay on that one or I could transfer on a new highway and transfer from there to yet another highway.
The last option, though it sounds the most complicated was the best choice - the one I should have chosen. I didn't want to do that one though because it meant a toll road - the final transfer was onto a highway with a toll. A few months after this story that I'm explaining now, I would take the second option and run into some problems.
But this is the story of taking the first option, to stay on the highway I just got on.
I got on this highway and drove on it for a while. I passed several options to transfer on other highways I was more familiar with, but I was sure that taking this highway would get me to a point only three miles from my house and it would be easiest to just stick with this one.
What I hadn't known at the time, was that the highway I was on, didn't just have a north and a south, but also a west and an east.
I was familiar with the subset of north and south, but I was on this highway going west. I was not familiar at all with this highway, except that occasionally I had used it when I was younger to get to a relative's house. On trips to my relative's house, I wasn't driving, I was a small kid zoned into his gameboy color and I was gonna catch all the Pokemon, gonna catch 'em all. In fact, you could say I was going to be the very best, the best there ever was.
I was driving on the highway for quite a distance when I realized that I was passing town names that I was not familiar with at all and I certainly knew I had been driving long enough to get near my town by this point.
I was not deterred by the increasingly evident fact that I was lost. I persevered!
I kept going, until I had gone another twenty miles and realized that my tank was running low. Really low.
Finally I took an exit that offered a U-turn. I went onto a small side-road and got out my phone. My phone had Google Maps on it so, I figured the GPS could figure out where I was and then direct me home. The problem is that Google Maps only could figure out a general radius of where I might be and figured I was still on the highway a mile down the road.
I figured out how to guesstimate approximately what I should do from the directions it offered. I also figured out that I had a remaining distance that was about five miles further than my car's tank could currently take me. Very simplistically:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------Total Distance
------------------------------------------------------------------ Gas Remaining
I set out and looked for gas stations so that I could put an extra gallon or two to ensure getting back alright. Of course the highway I was on didn't have any rest stops or gas stations along it, so as it turned out I was out of luck.
The directions called for getting onto another highway - the very highway I had thought I was on all along. This is when I realized my blunder. I got off onto another highway that would take me to the highway I thought I was on, but it very soon occurred to me that I desperately needed to go to the bathroom.
I figured a gas station would have a bathroom, but that would require getting to a gas station and as it turned out, there were no gas stations on any of the highways I was going to be on. Almost wherever you are, chances are you're pretty near some gas station. In fact, right now I'm within 100 feet of one. But the gas stations happened to congregate everywhere except where I needed them to be right then. I didn't know this at the time, so I kept my eyes peeled desperately looking for one.
Finally I had to give up. I pulled over and put on my blinkers and made sure my sister paid attention if any cops were coming. I walked into the brush at the side of the road and found a semi-decent coverage and just went for it. It had snowed but I didn't utilize the opportunity to write my name, I just cared about getting everything out.
I got back to the car after zipping up and, relieved, I continued my epic journey back. Eventually I got the the exit that was three miles from my house and there was a gas station there. As it turned out I only had a couple bucks, so I put in just about a gallon and fortunately it was enough to get me back to my house.
I ended up saving fifty cents by avoiding the toll, but using several extra gallons of gas by getting lost from avoiding that toll.
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