I could have entered my own contest today. We set off from home to take our daughter to a ringette game in St. Mary's Ontario -- a drive of roughly an hour from our house. We had a nice page of Mapquest directions in hand, but I'd forgotten to throw my gps tracker into my pocket. Looked simple enough. Somehow we missed one turn in the route. Boring so far.
Here's where it gets slightly more interesting. As we reached within about 2 km of our destination, our directions told us we should turn left even though we had just passed about fifty signs telling us that St. Mary's was on the right. So we turned left, drove about 19 km away from our destination, tracking our progress in the rear view mirror ("gee, now we're 13 km from St. Mary's!"). We're not usually stupid people (really!) but found ourselves entertaining a plethora of entertaining hypotheses rather than admit that we were lost. It's amazing how quickly we abandon both reason and a basic understanding of geometry when we're lost. Maybe there are TWO St. Mary's! Maybe the St. Mary's arena is not actually IN St. Mary's. It reminded me of our miraculous discovery of a pair of perfect mirror image lakes, each with matching osprey nests, on our hike in Algonquin park. I talk about this in my book. But at least this time, rather than being chased by bears, my kid was just chased by Bears (the Kitchener Bears). Eventually we saw sense, turned the car around, drove at about Mach 1.1 to get to the ice on time. And now my kiddo is wearing a gold medal around her neck.
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