As I was searching the internet for something completely unrelated, a headline caught my eye.  You know how that is.  You start looking for one thing and before you know it, you’ve wandered way off course and wasted an hour of your time.  Anyway, what grabbed my attention was “The fifteen types of people who should not visit New York City.”  Having been to NYC twice in my life, of course I had to click on the link to see if I fit into any of those categories.  Some were quite predictable, such as people who don’t like crowds (me), people who don’t like noise (me), people who like to be in nature (me), people who unable to budget (thankfully not me), and people are claustrophobic (also thankfully, not me.)  But the group that struck me as odd was people who don’t like to be lost.

Okay.  Does that imply there are actually people out there who like getting lost?  If so, then that is just downright weird.  What do they do?  Do they say to their significant other, “Honey, you know what sounds like a lot of fun?  Let’s drive out into the middle of nowhere and get lost.”  The significant other replies, “Wow, what a great idea!  Maybe we can get lost in a gang infested neighborhood and for even more kicks, the car will break down!”

I am the queen of getting lost.  I can get lost in areas where I have lived for over thirty years.  I can get lost going to places where I have been a hundred times before.  I can even get lost coming in my front door and trying to go out my back door.  I have accepted the fact I am directionally challenged.  Still, I haven’t resorted to GPS, as I am also technology challenged, and who knows where I might end up?  But as bad as it is to be alone and get lost, it’s even worse when I’m in the car with a man.

As we all know, men are never lost.  They may be temporarily “displaced,” but they are never lost.  Also, as we all know, men will never, under any circumstances, stop and ask for directions.  So this makes for some interesting scenery on the longer than necessary journey—sometimes the same scenery over and over.  I have been in a car with a man who actually expected me to read a map and then blamed me when we got lost.  Or worse, insisted on reading the map himself while going down the highway at seventy miles an hour. Obviously this was many years ago, as I realize nobody reads maps anymore. Now we have GPS which men love to program and follow along on their phones or tablets while driving to see exactly the path they’ve taken and the one yet to come.

So, back to the group of people who don’t like getting lost.  With the exception of possibly me, now people can get to anywhere they want to go in NYC with GPS.  In fact, I drove in NYC thirty years ago all by myself without technology, and I’m rather proud of that fact.  I even got a flat tire in NYC which I changed all by myself.  (Remember we are talking about NYC, where a single woman changing a flat tire would not invoke chivalry).  Now that I’ve been to NYC, I can say, “been there, done that.”  There is probably no need to repeat that experience.  But with GPS available,  I recommend that people who don’t like getting lost should be removed from the list of people who shouldn’t visit NYC.  Fortunately, I have the perfect substitution—people who like to park their cars.  You see driving in NYC isn’t really that bad.  The difficulty comes when you want to actually park your car in order to say, shop, visit museums, eat in a restaurant, etc.  Trust me when I tell you there is no place to park in NYC.  Not even in parking lots with highway robbery prices.  They are all full.  So you’re doomed to just drive around all day. It was in NYC where I came to my epiphany of how incredibly blessed I was to be from an area where they not only had parking lots, but the lots were free!  This realization, however, did earn me some mighty strange looks when I returned home and people saw me get out of my car, get down on my knees, and kiss the pavement.

 

I am excited to announce that my blogs are going to appear in the Daily News!  So please look for them in the paper or at the Daily News’ website!