Boston and the TomTom




So I flew back to Boston with my mom to get a change of scenery and watch my niece and nephew, C & H, so that their parents could get a change of scenery. The flights were so unnaturally easy, since I didn't have to be looking after anyone else, and there were people serving me drinks and snacks -- whoo! Weird! We arrived to an absolutely sparkling house with homemade bread and chili for dinner and got to see J & S until they left after lunch on Saturday.

They left us with the better of their two cars, and their GPS thingamajiggy, called the "TomTom" so we could find our way around. The kids were great -- rested and slept and ate and brushed teeth when you told them to. The TomTom wasn't so amenable.

First, he wasn't on speaking terms with us until Monday when we learned how to turn on the sound. So I would drive and Mom would say "Ummm, it's green until it's brown. Up ahead. Yeah, I can't tell how far you go until you turn left, but it's coming . . .". We actually made it to a pharmacy, Applebee's and church even without the TomTom talking (though C wouldn't get into the car with us until he had been reassured that we had TomTom with us -- we should have known then).

But Monday morning we were taking H to her dance class. It was a deceptively short distance. We had to wait for a minute by a church while a funeral procession went by, all the cars with purple flags on them. Then, somehow (I still don't know how) we ended up on a roundabout with choices like Newburyport, Boston, Anchorage, Tallahassee and so on. We got off at the wrong one. We pulled over as soon as we could and tried to talk to TomTom. Inputting a new address took a few tries, but we finally had it. We were a mere 1.6 miles away. We drove around, following the green and brown arrows. Then we looked up and saw the funeral procession coming at us from the opposite direction. We got closer, and finally pulled up to the address.

But it wasn't the right place -- it was supposed to be a brand new condo, and these were old clapboard houses. We asked H if this was where her dance class was, and she said 'no!' so I went back to inputting the address and it turned out I'd only put in half the street name.

Feeling less and less confident, we started out for the third time. Again, we were only a couple of miles away. I got the TomTom to talk to us, but I couldn't hear it over Alexander's Amazing Adventure going on in the back seat. At least we were finally recognizing something, but they were things we'd seen on our way home from the airport, like the Necco factory.

We got closer and closer, and then who was in our lane, but the very same funeral procession! We can't figure out how in the world it happened! The only answer is that they must have been lost too, and following their TomTom. We noticed that they had the limo version of an El Camino pickup truck in front of the Hearse to hold all of the floral arrangements. We passed them up, because obviously they were lost, and probably not going where we were.

We did find the place at last, but when we got there we were half an hour late, and dance class was over! We went out to lunch to console H with some fruit and a cheeseburger.
The happy ending is that we didn't get lost again, and we'd had (apparently) a quintessential Boston experience. I was just assured tonight that everyone has been lost in Boston at some point (taking the 1A instead of the 1, for example), and we should have celebrated with gelato at Alexanderplatz like Team Taryl always did.

We made a lot of cookies, had two or three tea parties, went to the cemetery, and watched Hard Hat Harry's Fire-gingingins. My apologies to J & S for leaving that at your house, but I've really done my time with it, and I still have the Trains and Helicopters DVD. C & H were charming, energetic, and helped me to realize that it's been a long time since I was in the thick of sippy cups.

Comments

Zina said…
What a funny story -- I can't believe you met the funeral procession three times. Glad you had a fun getaway other than that.

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