Never Lost with Nancy the Navigator

I thought I had the GPS all sorted out. I had deciphered how to use it before packing for France. Actually, getting to France wasn't going to be the hard part. Getting out of Madrid was. I was sure I had it worked out. I programmed in Charlie and Ann's address the night before departure, and we were ready to go. In the morning, we loaded the car, I turned Nancy the Navigator on, and confidently sat back to let Nancy tell Jack where to go.

The first time we rented a car in Madrid we discovered the city’s spectacular network of underground highways. Who knew? We’d been here for months but had only been on foot and on the Metro. There we were, in an underground maze, in a city with outrageously poor signage. It was a little stressful in the car that day, so for our trip to France we rented a GPS with the car. No sweat. It’s Hertz’s Never Lost system. We’d be golden. For added assurance I bought several new Madrid maps in a variety of scales, to meet our every need.

We needed to enter the tunnels less than a mile from home which didn’t leave much time to get oriented to Nancy’s style. Jack wanted to know why Nancy was telling us how far it was to Dr. Alvarez. “That’s the name of a street we’re headed toward,” I assured him. I was determined to follow Nancy’s directions to prove my prowess with this technology. And with that, we dropped down into the tunnel. It turns out that Nancys don’t receive signals underground. Good thing I had all those maps ready to consult. Suffice to say that when we finally saw sunlight again we didn’t know where the hell we were. Apparently we were somewhere southwest of Madrid, and we wanted to be northeast.

Luckily we had Nancy to set us straight. She did a lot of recalculating. “Just follow her directions, she knows where to go.” Now that I had all those maps out I could see generally what we were aiming for. But it was going to be a little tricky getting from where we were to where we wanted to be. It seemed that between Nancy and me we could work it out. But every time I told Jack to turn, Nancy objected and began recalculating. An hour later we had toured a great deal of the wrong side of town and were still utterly lost. Still recalculating.

“Why does that thing keep telling us how far away we are from Dr. Alvarez?” Jack demanded. “Turn that thing off and figure out where we are!” Right. Nancy had been determined to get us to Dr. Alvarez’s office and didn’t realize we wanted to see Charlie and Ann in France after all.

You’d think that at this point you could just ditch the electronics and rely on good old fashioned map reading. But Spanish maps can’t keep pace with road construction. So between the outdated maps, the outrageously poor signage, and the general complexity of metropolitan driving we needed more experience and more luck to begin our escape from Madrid. Or maybe just a little more experience programming Nancy.

About a third of the way to France I timidly turned Nancy back on and started reading the instructions.