Those of you who know me will get a kick out of this. What’s the one thing that I always have with me? Well I know I always have several things with me. But if you’ve ever been on any sort of trip with me no matter if it’s on the scooter or driving the truck camper what do I always have?
If you answered maps you would be correct. That’s right maps with an s as in plural. You see I usually take along several maps. I’ll have a large atlas or even a small atlas. Then I’ll also have the state gazetteer map for the states I’ll be traveling through. Now I’ve even stepped into modern times and purchased GPSrs. Yes that is an s on the end of that. I have two GPSr units. One for Geocaching and one for driving. The new GPSr has all sorts of info loaded onto it. Stuff like fuel stops, places to eat and lodging.
With all the money I’ve spent on things to help me find my way you’d think I could do just one simple thing. REMEMBER TO TAKE THEM WITH ME!!!!!!!!! That’s right, I forgot to take them with me this past weekend. No maps. No GPSrs, no nothing. I had one small map with me. The one map with the least details of any map I own. Nothing but the major roadways on there.
Oh wait. I need to clarify something. I did take one GPSr with me. I took the new Zumo that has all the handy-dandy info on fuel lodging and places to eat. Yes I did take it. There’s only on small problem. Yours truly had recently bought a larger sd card so that I could update said Zumo with all sorts of new info for the entire country. In preparing for this grand idea yours truly also deleted all the info from the previous mapping software stored on said Zumo.
So let me review all this. I have tons of handy maps and GPSrs to choose from. I take one of each luckily. The one map that only has the major highways and the one GPSr that I’ve recently deleted all the information from. So basically I have some slick toilet paper and a paper weight for said slick paper.
No problem. I’ve been all over Tennessee at some point or other. Granted I haven’t covered every square mile of our wonderful state. I do have most of it in my memory. Now I’m no spring chicken anymore. Sometimes it’s a tab bit foggy in the ol’ database upstairs. But surely I can pull something out of my ass and find that short cut I’m looking for.
Well eventually I did find the road I was looking for. Only after taking several turns through some picturesque bottom land. Nothing like flooded timber to sooth your mind when you are kicking yourself in the ass for forgetting all your navigational tools. Well other than hills and hollers that is. I did see some beautiful countryside while I was on my back roads adventure.
All is well now. I did make it to where I wanted to go. I did return home safely. So no harm no foul. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. I even tried to call some folks so that they could laugh at me too. It’s pretty hard to do that when you are so far back in the sticks that a cell phone signal is something of myth. Hell I bet the folks that live around the places I drove through don’t get the Grand Ole Opry until about Wednesday night.
Ride Safe,
Ronman
