Wednesday, April 02, 2014

A short unexpected detour

'Have you got sat nav?' Shirl asked.
'No,' I said, 'but I've got a bit of paper with instructions on.'

Which got me to my destination just fine. It was the fact that some planner had the brilliant idea of putting a slip road on to a motorway immediately next to a slip road off the motorway just where I was expecting my left turn to be that caused my problem. 

Hence my trip to Bristol turned into a trip to Bath. Do you know how far it is from junction 18 to junction 19 on the M4? Fifteen miles that's how far it is. That's fifteen miles before you can get off and turn around and come back again.

Take a deep breath. Okay, my visit to meet Rosie to find out all about her project, Beloved, was brilliant, giving me loads of help, stuff to think about, pray about, and the offer to go back and out on a visit with them at some time. Masses to pray about in fact. But really exciting.

I came away from our meeting feeling so upbeat that, in spite of messaging Shirley earlier in the day and saying I wouldn't be able to call in and see her, I decided I had time after all. Which did mean the challenge of finding another location in Bristol, which turned out to be a doddle, to someone now an expert on the Bristol ring road.

So two fab visits in one day. How was your day?

4 comments:

Katney said...

Ah, well. GPS (Sat Nav equivalent)

The other day MapQuest had told me it would take just over an hour. GPS said it would take just over two hours. Oh, dear. (It was more like an hour and a half.)

And the GPS regularly takes us in strange routes, or tells us you can't get there from here.

I've not gone off a cliff following any of them, but there was that one time it led us up a narrow dirt road to get to the center of the park when the entrance was right there next to us. It tried to, anyway. As we were pulling a trailer, we were wary...

And then there was "go south on 5th street" which was a one way street north...

Liz Hinds said...

Indeed, katney, on the one occasion we borrowed one it took us the wrong way and to make it worse pretended we were the ones at fault!

Anonymous said...

Wasn't I the lucky one? You must have thought me weird going on about my Rosie!

You are too kind about my pronunciation skills - I actually said 'sat nag' as called in this house!

Thanks Liz - see you next week! How often have we said that? Like, never, I think.

Ole Phat Stu said...

I now have a satnav on my motorcycle even. 'Cos besides "Take me from A to B" it has a special M/C feature "Take me from A to B via the twistiest possible roads" :-)