Darn You, NuVi

   Thursday morning Tom was off to work and we had cereal and just hung out. We read on our laptops and watched programs that Tom had recorded on his TV. We talked about lunch and I pulled up a map. Yesterday while Tom was bringing us home from the airport, I realized that 20 years of life in Traverse had not prepared me for California Interstates. Sure, I’d driven them before, just a couple of years ago in fact, but I was just not comfortable with the idea.

   There is the small town of Poway just a ways east of Tom that looked good. I figured we'd just plug it into our Nuvi which we’d brought with us preloaded with geocaches. Just plug it in and cruise on over. The vehicle we had was Tom’s Porsche because he had put his bike on the Subi so he could go for a ride at lunchtime. We sometimes chuckle about the Porsche because back when he was in High School, we had a CJ 7 rag top. When Tom first saw the price of a Porsche he was shocked “Why would you buy that? If I had that much money I would buy two jeeps!”

   The first time we came out to visit, Tom had given us the keys to the Porche and a paper with turn by turn directions for a ride through some mountain roads. It was great, all went well. Sure it’s a stick but so is our Jeep. Well, things didn’t go quite as planned. First, the Nuvi had some roads on it but for the most part, without names. Also - no place names. I figured out later that if I’d selected a cache in Poway and told it to go there, we would have had some turn by turn directions. Well we can figure this out.

    We pulled out of Tom’s development and I turned the wrong way. Instead of going east, we were going west. By the time we realized what I’d done, we were on the Ted Williams Freeway. I pulled off to turn around but there was no entrance going east. We drove around talking about buying a map but I just got back on and went further west until we spotted an exit with an overpass. In this process, I also discovered that first gear in the Porsche is very touchy and so is the clutch. In the Jeep, I can start out in second but not in this baby. Also, once you stall it out, you must shut everything down to engage the starter. Luckily, all my shifting screw ups occured in parking lots where we had plenty of time and space to work things out. Anyway, I made the turn and we were soon back in the proper direction and made it to Poway.

   Now, where to eat? We drove through a parking lot and spotted a place called the Chicken Pie Diner. Neat place, so thoroughly American. We were some of the few folks who were not greeted by name. After lunch, we drove around a bit but did not feel comfortable exploring a lot or going after caches. Back at Collage, we hung out until Tom got home, talked about our day and went in search of Mexican. We wound up at Rene’s Mexican Grill and Cantina.