Did I say Adventure?

I was always taught that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line! Well, to the wise man who said that, I would like to have a word...or two.

This weekend I learned otherwise.


Take two women, seriously looking forward to a weekend of pampering, one full tank of gas and one GPS System and you get two very frazzled and rather stressed ladies!


Dean (David's cousin) so graciously treated his lovely wife and I to a weekend away at a Hydro Spa set in the hills of Erasmia. David, being the helpful and concerned husband that he is, loaned me his trusty GPS directional system so that we would easily find this little gem of a place.

We set off without a worry...until "she" started speaking. This lovely little GPS thing, which is now going down in infamy named as "Wrong Way Wilma" speaks the directions as well as shows a very helpful (?) animated map of where you are going.


I should have suspected that Wilma had it out for me from the get-go when she refused to let me get on the highway.

Suzelle and I, being the rational and independent women that we are, looked at each other with a quick glance of confusion, then reasoned that Wilma was going to take us a secondary route to the highway.


Let me just say that we only spent about 2 minutes on a secondary highway - and instead spent much of our time making u-turns at dead ends, gates of military installations, police academys and prisions. A jaunt through Tembisa, a very poor neighborhood of Africans got our pulses pumping a bit, but the thought of trying to turn around and find our way back, or worse, call the husbands and try to explain where we were was even more upsetting to me. I am sure that poor Suzelle was sure that we would never find our way out of the endless left and right turns of every small neighborhood and government installation between Boksburg and the hills.


Being at the mercy of a small piece of technology, no bigger than 1/2 a brick, and knowing that your safety, sanity and much of your dignity are resting on it's advice is enough to make the most relaxed person a ball of nerves.


It was 2 1/2 hours later that we finally turned down the dirt road to the Hydro. Any doubts of whether I really needed a neck treatment were answered by the ball of knots in my shoulders.


I just couldn't figure out how Wilma had so quickly decided to undo me. It wasn't until later that I managed to navigate her many menues that I discovered that she was set to "shortest route" - a mere 68 kilometers. The "fastest route" - the one that would have taken us via the highways - was 85 kilometers. However, it would have only taken us 1 hour 10 minutes that way.


So, know that now I have learned my lesson. 1. Never trust a piece of technology 2. Old school is not necessarily bad 3. The shortest does not mean the fastest 4. Never put aside your own common sense for the ease of something new.

Thankfully, our trip home was much less eventful, despite Wrong Way Wilma's best efforts to take us left out of the Hydro's grounds and smack into the center of a squatter camp.


I may be Queen of the U-Turns, but I'll take that any day over having to listen to Wilma's grating voice one more time!