I have what I consider to be a rather sub-standard memory, so I'm creating this Blog to document the planning and execution of what I hope will be the first of many trips around the globe. I'm not convinced it's the best medium, but it's easily the most convenient.
Right now I am writing this from my hotel room in Indiana. I'm here for work, but it's a Sunday, and my only concern today is reading the two books about Italy I had delivered here from amazon. The current plan is to visit Rome, Venice and Florence in April. Full itinerary will be posted when it's available, as well as diary and picture posts during/after the trip!
To start this blog in style, I re-post this entirely true (seriously!) account of what happened to me in Indianapolis last week. Previously seen on facebook:
-----------------------------------------------------------It started as a normal day. Wake up at 7, be at work at 8a, drive back to the hotel around 8p. But then I decided to put my life in the hands of a malfunctioning gps unit, and our story begins.
The setting is Indiana, where Allstate has me working for a few weeks. We're 10 miles SW of the center of the city of Indianapolis- also known as the middle of nowhere. The characters are me and my friend Jayesh, who was born in India and has been working in the US for awhile. The goal is to drive from the restaurant (located in the middle of nowhere) to the hotel (located in the middle of a different nowhere). Jayesh was driving via "assistence" from his GPS. I of course had not paid attention on the way to the restaurant- we followed someone else there. I'm not really sure why we didn't follow someone back...
We turned on the GPS and it had our position plotted in the middle of a green square. "Drive to the nearest road," it said. We should have known.
So, we're driving. Jayesh turns on the radio, and after I state twice that I don't care what we listen to, asks if its ok to turn on some Hindi music. I agree, idly wondering if there's an Indian Yanni. Probably not. As he's fiddling with the IPOD, I notice that the road we're on is becoming increasingly questionable. The frequency of potholes is increasing (all Indiana roads seem to have SOME potholes), and gradually there's less and less pavement and more and more gravel. Jayesh also notices. "Is this right?" he says. "The green line is pointing us forward!" I say.
After awhile....WHAM!!! The tire sinks into a massive pothole and Jayesh turns on the brights. The "road", if you can call it that, is barely visible- it's on the same level as the dirt around us, but is a slightly greyer color. To the left we can sort of see a highway. To the right appears to be a piece of land so shitty that no one wants anything to do with it. Given that we've stuck it out this far, I express that we should keep going. Apparently I have waaaay too much faith in Dijkstra's Algoritm.* Still following the green line, we come to a split in the "road" (is it still a road if you have to squint to see where it is? Is it still a road if there's just as many rocks on the road as off it?)
It's about this time where I just start cracking up. "WELCOME TO INDIANA!" I'm saying. "THIS IS AWESOME!" etc. Anyway, to the left is some road, there's water covering a section of it. To the right is a slightly more stable looking piece. The GPS says that we should go straight. There is no straight. Straight is a giant ditch. We go right.
Anyway, the fun continues for a good 10 minutes. We nearly drive into a sharp dropoff. We drive over a "bridge." We find a way "out"- but there's a fence with the gate closed. We have no idea which way we came from. We encounter other forks, we encounter dead ends, the fun continues... Suddenly, the path is gone. No road in front of us, no road to the left, no road to the right. We can't u-turn because of the rocks everywhere. We eventually manage to turn around... and now we see no road on ANY side.
It's about this time when Jayesh says, "9-1-1 is good, yes?" I consider that conversation in my head for a moment: "911- what's your emergency." "Umm- we're lost in the middle of a completely barren field." "Ok, sir. Where is the field?" "I have no fucking clue." I tell Jayesh that I don't think they can help us.
We can still see the highway, so we kind of head that way. Luckily, we find a road pretty fast. Seriously, we'd still be out there otherwise. Amazingly, the road starts to clear up. There's a lot of water on it, but it's getting WIDER... which I take to be a good sign. Suddenly it becomes clear that we're on the way out, and we're pretty damn happy about it.
We get to a stop-sign and make a random turn. We're so glad to be on a road without rocks that we hardly care which direction to go. The GPS recalculates and keeps telling us to do u-turns. I tell him we should but Jayesh doesn't listen to me (finally). Eventually we get to a highway, it recalculates again and this route actually looks reasonable.
The Hindi music is switched on in celebration. I can't understand it, of course. Jayesh tells me that the guy is singing about a girl who makes him feel good. "I bet she does..." I think tiredly.
About fifty minutes into a ten minute drive, we arrive at the hotel. I then I spent about that long again writing this ;)
*Of course, there's nothing wrong with the Algorithm. Whoever programmed the GPS unit just put some really low weights on that route. They should have been a little higher. Like, for example... MAX_INT. (Maybe that's what happened? Integer overflow on the multiplication!!)
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