I’ll give you directions, but you have to be comfortable with landmarks and slang names for various areas.
“Then turn right at the stab n’ grab, if you reach the Canada lot you’ve go too far.”
I don’t “live” in the city, I live in my house, and I only leave to go to college or work. So if want to know where my college or my work are, I’m your man. Otherwise…
top tip: explore. it’s pretty fun to purposefully take wrong turns and just learn what’s out there just out of eyesight
Played a keep the flow, right turn on red game in San Francisco… made every right turn on every red I got. So many beautiful unique homes abound!
Warning: This tip does not applies to third world countries. If you’re lost in Latin America, you’re doomed.
I’m not afraid to confess that I’ve given completely fabricated directions out of pure embarrassment.
“Yes, yes, just continue straight in that direction for a while and then turn left twice and you are there!”
Those poor souls…
When I was about 12, someone asked me for directions as he was going around in circles in his car. I gave him directions which I later found out was several miles in the opposite direction.
I’m 36 and I still think about this. I hope he found his destination…
Maybe he is still driving to this day.I have one of these. I just relived the whole thing and the shame of it all over again.
In my mind I like to think of what I should have said: the exact tone and more than enough information to comfort that poor lost family that I sent in the wrong direction.
i can give directions very easily. i simply read them off of my phone
google maps is wrong many times considering the number of lanes my locality has
One day I was walking about.
Someone said “Excuse me, could you tell me where is (random street)?”
I was like “That sounds familiar, hold on a second.”
Looked it up from the map on my phone.
It’s literally the next street over.
It was about that time I decided people perhaps shouldn’t ask me directions if they value their time.I think that often. Turns out, a lot of people are incapable of looking up information on the internet. So me spending 2 minutes searching it saves someone hours, somehow.
Oh, are we the next generation of Boomers imagining bad directions we gave before smartphones solved that issue almost completely?
not really sure I follow what you’re trying to say, but in my experience it’s pretty common for directions to come up in casual conversation. Chatting about traffic and ways to get around it is pretty top tier smalltalk for me because it’s actually helpful to know and isn’t just the copy-paste “how’s your day” “good, yours?” “good.”
I’m definitely not with majority on this. Every city I’ve lived in, I can navigate decently well by major streets, highways, landmarks, etc. I think it came with the fact that I moved around so much growing up. I always want to feel like I know the area, so I’ll study a map for a couple hours whenever I first move in.
I’m pretty much the same way with places I’ve lived where I had to drive everywhere. My current city though, 6 months after moving here (and 6 months of living car-free) I could give people detailed directions around a significant chunk of the city (the areas where I went).
Same when I moved to a different part of the city and started biking around that part of town.
You’re so much more aware of your surroundings when walking or biking.
I struggle with spatial awareness and memory and why wouldn’t I use the amazing achievement that is ubiquitously available GPS service and directions?
Sorry I don’t get out much.
It’s so funny, my kids split out exactly half and half, one half of them I could have driven to Miami before they realized we weren’t headed to school, and the other half, if I took a different route would scream “you are going the wrong way!”
Bro how many kids you got
A lot. 4 that I had plus 5 I married into, some of those 5 my husband had adopted, some he’d spawned. Some were already grown when we got together though, so we didn’t have them all in the house (or car) at once.
It’s nice now they are grown because the kids have a good network of siblings and boyfriend/girlfriends, they hang out together and get along, help each other.
Your kin network sounds tiresome.
so relatable lmao
I live in the suburbs outside Washington, DC. One evening, we were in Bowie, MD (east of DC) at a shopping center, and a woman asked us for directions to the Mormon Temple.
For those who are not familiar, the Mormon Temple is off the beltway north of DC. It’s 25 miles away, and right now - nearing midday - it’s showing a 34 minute drive. However, when this happened, it was the evening rush hour, so it was at least an hour away, probably closer to an hour and a half, honestly. It was a drive I wouldn’t want to make, if I could avoid it.
She didn’t believe us. My wife just headed into the store we’d been heading for. I tried to convince her some more, but eventually she just drove off to ask someone else. I wonder how that adventure ended for her.
The only thing I can figure for how she got so far off course: I think she started typing the address of the Mormon Temple (which is on Stoneybrook Drive in Kensington) into whatever map app she was using, and the app gave her a result on Stonybrook Drive in Bowie, and she went with it - the shopping center we were at is just off Stonybrook. Note they aren’t spelled the same, but I can understand overlooking that. Who knows where she started and how long she’d been driving already.
