Navigating by Remote Control

Ok, rule number one.  When a bunch of people are going for a ride in the car, driver sits behind the wheel.  The rest of the people line up by height.  The tallest gets the seat in front next to the driver.  The shorter people go in the back.

How do I know this?  Simple, I'm 6'4".  Tall people don't fit in the back of the car, it just doesn't work.  Unless you're driving a limousine or one of those boats that they used to sell back before the 1973 oil embargoes, there just isn't enough room back there for anyone over 6 feet tall no matter how you try to spin it.

That might explain how I constantly got drafted to be the know-it-all who is next to the driver up front all the time.  Yes, the navigator would be a nicer way to phrase it.

I don't care if she's your wife or your elderly grandma, putting someone in the back who is over 6 foot tall means that you're just not thinking.

But it does mean that you get good directions.  You should at any rate, or that tall person should be locked in the trunk, which might even be worse than sitting behind the driver in a compact car.

I got excellent at giving directions, but there were always limitations.  Back in the stone age, when your grandparents and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, there were somethings called Maps.  These things were typically either in a book or were a giant piece of paper best used on a wall to cover a nasty stain that got there when you tried to cover up a food fight you had when you were 12.  You would open this and now the entire surface of the car was covered with a sheet of paper covered with brightly colored lines representing roads of various shapes, and rivers.

Don't drive on the Blue Roads.  They are rivers.  Your car won't survive long nor will it get where you are planning on going unless you are trying to collect on the insurance.  In that case, you're a bad person and you made me a Sad Panda.

Later, you would find things that would fight that massive sheet of paper by simply printing out the road in a strip.  Don't stray from your route or else you will fall off the edge of the map to where There Be Dragons, and who knows what other evil creatures of the night might find you as you hurtle through the unknown in your little compact car of doom.

I still haven't managed the attraction of a GPS.  Sure, I have the software on my phones, whether Android or iPhone.  They work well enough, but then you get this rather assertive voice barking at you while you're stuck in traffic.  The one I used last had a fight with the one the driver had turned on for the same route and as a result there are little computer chips and shards of LCD screens laying on the floor of the car.

It wasn't a pretty sight.

This time though, I will be a Navigator by remote control.   Kevin is coming back from up North where he spent a week with Mom.  Holidays with Mom, then Mom and Sister's Family.  He's currently stuck on the Auto Train where a switching problem in Banjo Player County Georgia has him limping along to the promised land of North Florida and Sanford Beyond.

How these trips go are that I start getting calls when the train is past Daytona on its way South.  Then he's sitting in the station playing with the iPhone getting fidgety waiting for the giant train to disgorge his car so he can drive back.

Stop by a Wawa in Central Florida if one is nearby and get an Italian Hoagie.  I swear the bread is made by license by them from Amoroso...

As things progress I get more calls saying I just passed a cow in the middle of a field, do you know where I am?

Well, no, I can watch your progress on Google Earth, but I don't have access to those Spy Satellites that I've heard about.  If I did, this world would be an interesting place, but that's a different flight of fancy.

It's bad enough that I load up Google Earth and start looking at things like borders on the map and scratching my head as to why I can trace the border for miles when the neighbors have been peaceful for 200 years.

You know, Pennsylvania and Maryland?

We seem to have jumped over the standalone GPS era and went right to the Smartphone based GPS.  But it's still easier to ask me, 100 miles away, where that particular cow is.

Ok, just get yourself home.  I'm sure you must be back in Florida by now.

You're not?  Oh well, I'll go make some espresso.