Traveling With Women

Grand Rivers, KY

I just got back from a long trip with three women. There was my bride of 37 years, my mother in-law, and Lena. I only had real trouble with one of them.
I think everyone has disagreements while traveling but my wife and I do okay. She lets me think I’m right. And I had very little trouble with my mother in-law. I would have to occasionally remind her that “You know, we’re a long way from home to be saying stuff like that.”
Then there was Lena. Lena is the name we’ve given to our GPS device. She can talk, and we have begun to think of her as another person in the car. Lena is fairly reliable, she’s opinionated and she is not always correct when we’re on the road. Unlike myself.
For instance there was the time in Amarillo when she directed us to a J. C. Penney store. When we arrived at “Your destination on right” I couldn’t help but notice it looked similar to a single story ranch home complete with stucco and a tile roof and a two car garage. It looked just like every other house for as far as I could see. I parked in the driveway and began to get out. My wife asked me what I was doing and I told her “I thought we were going to buy a dress.” “Stay in the car, you know darned well that that’s just a house.” Well, I had just about had it with our fancy little device that day but we later found out someone’s thumb had brushed the screen and changed the address that Lena was looking for. But the aggravating thing for me was that she knew that we were looking for a clothing store and should have known better than to take us into a residential area. She can even talk for crying out loud.
On our recent trip we were in the Grand Rivers, KY area, we had just eaten dinner and we were headed to our hotel. Darkness was upon us and as I got back out to the highway I began to turn right when Lena and my wife and my mother in-law all said to turn left. We were trying to find our hotel. A ’debate’ began about where our hotel was located. I said “there is nothing south of here but trees, it’s a state park, and we were just there two hours ago, our hotel is north of here up on the interstate.”
I lost the ‘debate’ and we went south until we heard Lena say “arriving at destination on right.” I pulled off the highway and up to a tree. Well, actually it was several hundred thousands of trees. I said “Hold that thing up to the window and show her the trees and ask her if that looks like a hotel to her.”
When we checked into our hotel my wife mentioned to the lady that we had had trouble finding the place. The lady behind the counter calmly said, “You must have one of those GPS devices, they don’t have our location correct, they think we’re in the state park south of town.”
All of this takes me back to when times were simpler. To when all we had was an out of date map and I could wonder aimlessly until I succumbed to one of my wife’s requests to please stop and ask directions. But I know we must advance with the times and these little mapping devices are pretty handy. However ours has been wrong a couple of times and so we question everything she tells us. However she does add a touch of uncertainty and excitement to an otherwise long, boring drive.
But then again, so would diarrhea.

~From the Midwest Producer Magazine and the Burt County Plaindealer. ~