Get Lost!

We arrived in the village of Torroja del Priorat under the cover of a cool, dark night. Thankfully. Perhaps in the dim light, none of the townsfolk saw what came next.

We had been driving for over five hours, en route from Madrid. Following directions provided by Google Maps, the roads had narrowed steadily, slowly funneling us toward our destination. The bustling six-lane highway near Madrid dwindled to four lanes after a while. At two lanes, we passed a somewhat ominous looking nuclear reactor, its hourglass tower looming large. In time, the road seemed to lose its energy, or maybe its purpose. It narrowed further and began to wander and weave up and down the mountain sides, sometimes not even bothering to have a centre line. Ulysse got right into the spirit of it, hugging corners and shifting the gears of our tiny yellow Opel like a rally driver. The darkness gave our drive a video game-like feeling, with the constant blur of bright reflectors flashing by, warning of turns. 

We finally made it to Torroja del Priorat, population 148. Google took us in a sweeping arc around the outside of the stone village, romantically lit with old-fashioned streetlamps, to the other end of town where the little red pin of our rented house was located.

“In 200 metres, turn right!” chirped the sunny Google Maps Lady. In 200 metres, we turned right onto a beautiful but narrow street, paved with flat stones inlaid in concrete. The road became so narrow as we progressed that I reached out of the window to flip in the passenger-side mirror. 

We were both starting to question where this road was taking us when Lady Google interjected, “In 100 metres, turn left!” 

I looked down to double-check the route on my phone. There it was, our destination pin was right there, just one more turn away. Still looking at Google Maps, I saw that we’d come to the intersection and told Ulysse to turn left. Ulysse, however, had stopped the car and started laughing. I followed his gaze to the left.

There were stairs. Lady Google wanted us to drive up a stairway. We realized the next morning that the lovely narrow street with the inlaid stone was actually a sidewalk. Oops.

When we go on these trips, Ulysse drives and I navigate. At first, the rationale was that he had a fancier credit card that covered car rental insurance if he was the driver, but really, this arrangement was inevitable. I have loved maps for as long as I can remember, their mystery and possibility. I love learning a map, building it into my mind so that I not only have a sense of where I am, but also how to get from one place to another—bonus points for finding obscure but efficient routes. In years past, while on trips with friends or participating in team-building exercises of the treasure-hunt variety, it would agitate me to no end if the map were not in my hands. (I realize that this calls to question my abilities as a team player.) Two decades ago in Kuwait, before the advent of the smartphone, I sweet-talked a GIS sales rep out of a newly minted atlas of Kuwait City and then proceeded to refer to road names that the Kuwaitis had never heard of. (“What do you mean, ‘Al Bukhari Street’? You just head toward the sea and turn left at the blue house!”) A few years later, unable to find a map of Lubumbashi for sale anywhere, I removed the large, out-dated city plan from the wall of the Médecins Sans Frontières office, photocopied it section by section onto A4 paper, then painstakingly taped the copies together into a whole.

For better or worse, I am a map magpie.

Those paper maps have become scarce even in developed countries and the ability to navigate with them is fast becoming a lost art. We don’t have to pay attention to where we have been to figure out where we are: a little blue dot tells us that now. We don’t have to puzzle over which route to take. We just plug the destination into our miraculous, GPS-enabled phones and a cheery voice will tell us where to turn. In large swathes of the world, we are whisked along the fastest route from A to B as though we have all agreed that saving time is the only thing that matters. What about those happy discoveries we used to make, either intentionally by taking the “scenic route”, or unintentionally by getting lost? What of the economic impact to towns that don’t happen to lie along whatever path the mapping algorithms deem to be most efficient, or conversely, the folks living on a formerly quiet road that now shows up as the clever alternative to avoid slow traffic on the main thoroughfare? 

While I have uttered less than charitable things to and about Lady Google when she’s led us astray in sparsely populated regions of Europe, I am also grateful that we have not yet Google Street Viewed and optimized every route. Besides asking us to drive up or down stairs on several occasions, Lady G didn’t fare well with the endless roundabouts in Malta, some of which had seven or eight exits leading to places with names she didn’t even attempt to pronounce (she spelled them out). At one wrong turn, we stumbled upon a roundabout through which ran unmarked, ancient cart tracks, carved nearly half a metre deep into the bedrock outcrop. On Gozo, she took us along a road with such tight, steep switchbacks that the car made solid contact with only three tires and I had to get out to push, providing some good amusement to a local farmer in the process. On Tenerife, Lady G thought all exits led to a town called “Salida.” On Crete, rather than guiding us down the zippy highway heading south out of Heraklion, she suggested a route that went from paved, to gravel, to a dirt trail with goats, and back again. What to do but laugh and take pictures of the goats?

Technology has made our lives relatively safe, predictable, and optimized…not to mention made it way too easy to turn off our brains and let a machine decide for us. Maybe we need to get lost a little more often, to seek out the obscure routes, the shortcuts that aren’t actually short. Losing our way is often a path to surprise and sometimes even delight…or if nothing else, to a memorable story or two. 

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