davbeck Thread

Right after I got married, my wife and I were on our way to meet my brother at a campground a couple hours from anywhere. He had suggested we take a different route than he normally did, since we were coming up after work and the road would be less winding. I pulled up the direction on my iPhone and we headed out. Just before dusk, about an hour after we lost cell reception, my phone tells us to take a left, and from then on the population gets thinner and thinner. Eventually we are on a dirt road in the middle of the forest and it is getting dark quick. My wife wanted to turn around, but I kept saying "if there is a road, there must be something on the other side." And besides, my phone kept giving us directions. But the trees were subtly slowly getting closer and closer and the road getting smaller and smaller.

I have a really bad habit when I get stressed to try and break the tension with humor that rarely is all that funny. Like pointing out security flaws at the airport when I'm with nervous flyers. So I start joking about a newlywed couple driving in the woods at night, lost and with no way of getting help. My wife was not amused.

My phone is still giving us directions, but it's getting harder and harder to tell where the road is. We haven't seen another person or man made structure for an hour or more by the time my wife starts crying out of fear. We have no way to call for help, no way to look up better directions, and besides the directions, my phone isn't showing any maps. We dig around the car and find the paperwork that my wife thankfully printed out from the campground which happened to have some vague directions. We carefully followed the path backwards, the whole time Siri is yelling at us that we are going the wrong way like Lakitus in Mario Kart until we find the road we had turned on and make it to the campground right around 11PM.

When I got home I looked at where my phone was directing us, and it was sending us to literally the middle of no where (http://cl.ly/image/0w3J3c3H0y1B). Somehow Apple Maps had us going down old logging roads to a clearing in the forest. To this day, the thought of being so disconnected from help, not knowing where I am, having my wife look at me to know what to do and not having anything for her, just scares the shit out of me.

Lessons learned: 1. Listen to your wife and turn the car around. 2. Don't ever trust Apple Maps. 3. Not all roads have something at the other end.