We had been all day at the Children’s Museum and after we have freshened up back at the hotel, our friends children start imploring their parents to go to a favourite restaurant of theirs that they spied this morning when we went out.
It’s now dark and since no one can remember if this eatery was down the road to the left, or down the road to the right, they decide to do it the easy way, search for the closest one with the Sat. Nav. and then we can simply follow them to the restaurant.
The Restaurant name is duly programmed, they set off out of the hotel car park with us keeping close behind … but then, a very short way down the main road, we are surprised to see that their indicator light is blinking to turn right to take us to the motorway.. O.K…. … they know where they are going surely, so we follow.
Some twenty minutes and rather a few off-ramps later it appears that this restaurant is actually quite a lot further away than we thought.
Then something amazing happens.. we round a deep bend and on our right is the massive WalMart that looks startlingly identical to the one that my friend and I shopped in yesterday.. funny, we muse.. err, but wasn’t the WalMart we shopped in just a short distance from our hotel ?
We start to smile as we pass by a Diner that looks strangly identical to the Diner where we had breakfast, and then a block further on our left we explode in mirth as we actually drive past our hotel ! Three blocks past our hotel in the opposite direction that we started out from, is the restaurant we have been looking for !
Why on earth did the Sat. Nav. get us to drive in a huge loop to the right of the hotel when the address we were trying to get to was just a short distance from our hotel on the left? No clue.
Two cars pull into the restaurant car park… we tumble out laughing and our friends have red faces… they said that they hoped that when we passed the WalMart that maybe we hadn’t noticed, but realised by the time we passed the Diner and then had our hotel flash past us on the left, that they were rumbled…
We now have our very own Sat.Nav. disaster story…. and I am consoled by the fact we have seen that a machine can actually navigate even worse than we do when we are left on our own (and it’s no mean feat to beat the navigationally challenged Kiwidutch family)
Thus we have just discovered that Satellite Navigation systems apparently have an evil sense of humor and that it’s maybe possible that some computer geek suffering from friday afternoon boredom may have stashed secretly inside your Sat.Nav: “destination wild goose chase” !
