Much a day

Feb. 25th, 2014 11:24 pm
eclectic_boy: (Zeno)
[personal profile] eclectic_boy
I'm pretty worn out considering how much of today I spent sitting down. While it's not quite at the level of your average Jillian-Day-Of-Many-Things, it's about as close as I ever get, and so merits describing via LiveJournal.

I was up at 8:00am (after going to bed at my usual 2:00) to call Enterprise and remind them they were sending a car to pick me up at 9:00. They had asked me to make that call, and despite it I didn't get picked up until 9:30, and didn't actually have the rental car until 10:00, at which point I drove to a previously-incognita section of West Philadelphia, getting lost only once, to pick up Wendy, who I knew when I was a student and she the Physics Department adminasst. I was driving her to Oakland NJ (the upper-east corner of the state) to see someone concerning her physical condition, recovering from a stroke. It was about a 150-minute ride of muches potholes and intermittent flurries, redeemed by one of the best sandwiches I've ever had -- if you have any reason to go to Oakland, eat at DJs Deli.

The journey back south was even longer owing to rush hour and to going into semideepest Delaware, in search of the house Wendy had grown up in. Which we failed to find -- Enterprise hadn't had any GPSs left to rent to us, so we'd been going off my voluminous Mapquest printouts for the day's journeys. While I like Mapquest's feature of telling you the names of the streets right before and right after the one you're making your next action at, they apparently have some bad data, as once we were close (i.e. off numbered highways), the streets they told us to turn on weren't there. So we gave up and headed back to the motel she's spending the night at, in New Castle, and again got lost because Mapquest said we should turn on DE 301 when we encountered no such road, or at least no signs -- the actual turn should have been on US13/US40. After that everything was fine; we got to the motel at 8:00 and a little later I headed home to go right to bed. Given that it's 11:20pm you can see how well that plan fared, but on the whole I think the day went at least as well as it was likely to've.

Date: 2014-02-26 10:40 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] wayman.livejournal.com
The moment I read "Mapquest" I checked the date of this post to see if it was from 1997. Because I'm guessing their data still is....

Date: 2014-02-26 12:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] eclectic-boy.livejournal.com
Two weeks ago I would have had the same reaction, but then a friend of mine told me they preferred Mapquest to Google, so I tried it out and agreed that its directions were more useful. Now after this bad experience, I'm once again dubious... though I'll probably give it one more try since it's so darn helpful to have that "Elm St is one after Main St, with a Walgren's on the corner; if you reach Oak Ave you've gone 0.2 miles too far".
Edited Date: 2014-02-26 12:54 pm (UTC)

Date: 2014-02-26 02:27 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] reldnahkram.livejournal.com
If I know I'm going someplace new, I'll try to review the directions in advance to look for tricky spots or places where the computer/GPS is being dumb and there's clearly a better way to get from A to B. I'd much rather have a good sense of where I'm going with gps or printed directions as a backup, rather than relying on it completely.
Edited Date: 2014-02-26 02:28 pm (UTC)

Date: 2014-02-26 11:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] wayman.livejournal.com
Your friend is a time traveller from the past, doubtless a part of Mapquest's marketing plan to convince denizens of the future to return to their product!

Date: 2014-02-26 12:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] amyprime.livejournal.com
Lesson learned: Always check to see if Jim is interested in the airport/car-swap thing, even if you think, "Oh, it's only two days, it's probably not worth it for him."

Date: 2014-02-26 12:55 pm (UTC)

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