Saturday, June 11, 2005

A Sign From God

We (my sister Bonnie and I) went apartment hunting with Cory and Jamie (my son and his wife) today. He got a job a couple of hours away from here and they're moving to a little town none of us have ever been to.

Cory, being the designated man in our group, had control of the map. He and Jamie had researched apartment complexes online so we had a general idea about apartment locations, but that was it.

Cory would say things like, "Go down House Street and when you get to Highway 35, you will take either a left or a right." Not very helpful to me, the driver.

At one point when we were hopelessly lost (there were many points when we were hopelessly lost), he said, "I thought this Dumble Street went all the way through. Oh, I see. It stops right here."

"Good job, Magellan," I said, being the always supportive mother. This led to a discussion of explorers in general and who invented maps.

"Magna Carta?" I asked.

"No, that had something to do with laws or something."

"I think it was Vasco DeGama."

"No, Lewis and Clark."

"No, they discovered Louisiana."

"No, that was LaSalle."

"What did Ponce De Leon discover?"

"Florida."

Looking back at the map, Cory said, "Well, there are these red lines all over the map!"

"You mean the streets?" I asked, always the smartass.

Looking at the map, Bonnie said, "Those are the latitude and longitude lines, Cory. These are the streets." That explained a lot. In Cory's defense, however, the dumbass who made the map did make the grid lines red, just like the streets. The City of Alvin mapmaker was no Ptolemy, I'll tell you that.

Even after we figured out the problem with the grid lines, we continued to get lost. At one point, I had to make a u-turn. The street wasn't wide enough to just make the u-turn so I had to pull into a church parking lot. As I was waiting in the parking lot for the traffic to stop so I could turn around, Bonnie said, "LOOK!" and pointed to the sign you see below which was about five feet in front of us.





We were speechless for about 10 seconds. Then, "Leif Ericsson. He was a viking or something wasn't he?"

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11 comments:

Lorna said...

You were speechless for 10 seconds?

Lauren said...

What a great message!

This is my first time here. You have a great blog. I love accidentally coming across other Texas bloggers (found you from se7ven's link). I'll be back! :)

Lewis E. Moten III said...

Heh, thats kinda funny. Question - Did you make the U-Turn, or were you agnostic for the day?

OldHorsetailSnake said...

I trust the chuckle you got overcome the vast amount of frustration from going the bad way on "Dumble" Street.

Anonymous said...

You can always call me for help with directions ;-)

By the by, Wang and I have an ASML friend in Alvin.

Unknown said...

Maybe the mapmaker is a member of the church (drumming up business?).

Anonymous said...

I thought Leif Ericsson was a teen idol back in the '70s. He was always on the cover of "Tiger Beat"

Laurie said...

Lorna - It was actually more like 5 seconds.

Texas Biscuit - Isn't Se7en great? Welcome to the party.

Lewis - Hey! Long time no see. I did make the u-turn. We needed all the help we could get yesterday.

Old Horsetail - We didn't really get frustrated. It was an adventure.

Susan - Hahahah! I should have called you! Al has fans everywhere doesn't he?

Comfort Addict - I hadn't thought of that!

Baby Sister Bon - That was Leif Garrett...and the saga continues.

OldRoses said...

OMG! Reminds of why I stopped letting my ex navigate when we were married. I had to do all the driving because he couldn't get behind the wheel without hitting something (cars, cones, tollbooths, etc) so he got the job of navigating. But only for a few months. We had horrible fights when he gave me bad directions or claimed the streets weren't on the map. FINALLY, I snatched a map away from him and discovered . . . are you ready for this?







He was holding it upside down!

nothing_but_coke said...

Wow! That would have left me speechless too.

Actually, I didn't realize that Alvin was that big..I thought that is was just a dot on a map and Hwy. 6 ran through it.

Laurie said...

Old Roses - I think I might have an idea of why he's an EX!

Shelli - It's not that Alvin is that big, it's just that we were that confused. It is just a dot on the map, but it was a f**ked up map. :)