Monday

Last night we had dinner with Jen's friend and former co-worker Wendy, her boyfriend Rick, and her daughter. It's a strange vibe. We make plans with them fairly regularly and almost every time when the day arrives something comes up and one of us has to cancel. Last night we pulled it together. It was a close thing though as Jen and I were so incredibly tired after our night of possible-breaking-and-entering paranoia (which in my case at least hasn't eased all that much yet).

We had a good time. Wendy made a nice dinner and we talked about a lot of things, including real estate shopping, Rick is an agent, which may have been a sort of subconscious maybe-we-should-move thing on my part. I don't know.

What I do know is that I have learned to fricken hate the Everett Turnpike.

If you take the Northern half of Route 3 across the Mass/New Hampshire line and follow it North for a while it eventually turns into the Everett Turnpike. This is a toll road with the tolls (at least the ones I know of) situated on the exit ramps when you drive North, and the entrance ramps when you drive South.

I didn't know the area and I am not familiar with that stretch of highway. I had directions printed off from Google Maps and I had the GPS on my phone showing my location with the route to Wendy's marked.

Maps told me to take exit 11. When I approached exit 11 the GPS appeared to be telling me to stay on the highway. I decided to follow the GPS. I did not make a mistake by doing that. Nor would I have made a mistake by taking exit 11. As it turns out, exit 11 runs perfectly parallel to the highway for a long stretch. Maybe a quarter of a mile or more. It wasn't until I saw the toll booths just a few feet to the right of the highway that I realized my mistake. The GPS did want me to take the exit, it's just that the two roads were so close together you couldn't tell by looking at it.

Crud, thinks I, as I continue heading up to exit 12. I took the exit, paid the toll, took a left turn and crossed the highway via an overpass, took a left turn to get back on the highway, and paid the toll again.

When I got to exit 11, this time heading South, I took it. Again, it stayed parallel to the highway for a while. There was a hard right turn at one point, but the tolls were still ahead of me so I knew I had things right this time.

Except that the tolls are on the entrance ramps on the South side. Suddenly I was on the friggin' highway again.

I went South to exit 10, crossed an overpass to get to the other side of the highway, and paid the toll again and got back on heading North. This time I managed to raise my IQ a few points to a level somewhere above that of a chimpanzee and navigated the exit correctly. I did make one more wrong turn on the way to the house, but it was just a minor one and easily corrected. In the end I was 17 minutes late.

The moral of this story is, I would prefer not to live near the Everett Freakin' Turnpike. Stupid highway. Stupid, stupid highway.

(more like stupid driver, but let's not consider that.)