Yesterday turned out to be one of “those” days. It started out in a normal fashion, but quickly unraveled. Since it turned out that Miami Springs was several miles from the coast I decided to drive east until I found water, then turn north for a easy 2 1/2 drive to my next destination. Getting to the coast was fairly easy, I just took a big, many lane road through a forest of giant, super fancy “sky scrapers” that appeared to be mostly banks or 50-70 story apartment houses. I guess all those big banks require all of those people stacked up in the apartments. In any case, all I had to do was stay in the middle lane and keep on going until I could go no further.

I found water, bridges and what appeared to be an island between me and the open ocean. I then plugged the new address goal into the car’s GPS and headed out. The first part of the new trip was through the more “seedy” part of town with the freight trains, garbage facilities, car crushing facilities, bars, strip joints and “adult” toy stores were congregated. I enjoyed it because it was colorful, and the traffic was light. However, I eventually got through that part of town and entered the more upscale parts – and traffic virtually stopped. I had purposefully started traveling around 9:00 am, thinking that I would leave the beach area around 10:00, thus missing the rush hour. If I missed it, I can’t image what that would have been like.

The roads in Florida seem to be uniformly a nightmare – for many reasons, and this was no exception. The roads through town tend to be seven or eight lanes wide, running at 90 degrees to each other. Every couple of blocks the cross using very long cycle time stop lights. So there is a constant crush of cars in all directions at the stop lights. It normally takes 2 or 3 light cycles to progress one block. I is not unusually to finally get to the head of the line and still have to wait though even more cycles because block ahead hasn’t cleared yet. It took me almost 2 hours to go the four miles to get “out of town.”

By the time I roamed around Miami trying to go north I was totally lost. Actually, since I had never been there I started totally lost. I did what I normally do in these situations, trusted the lady in my dash telling me when to turn, and when she is going to recalculate because I failed to follow her directions. However, since my car’s map showed that I was headed north, and the time of arrival seemed about correct, I just relaxed and went with the flow. However, once traffic eased up a bit I started glancing at my paper map to get an idea where I was. The paper map is important because the range shown on the car map is much too close in and detailed – you can’t tell where you are in general. Not only that, but once you set the destination it stops showing it, it just tells you where the next turn is going to be, and it shows the estimated arrival time and distance. I keep looking for road I was on and couldn’t find it.

I finally pulled off the road to concentrate a bit on this problem and finally found it. I was traveling west, not north. It turned out that two things had changed on the map, both of which were unknown to me. One thing was that the map display now was showing the orientation of the map to be “north” rather than what is had been doing for the past month, which was showing the direction that the car is pointed. I assumed the “N” on the display meant I was going north and since the road I hoped to travel was almost due north that seemed correct. But the “N” meant that the map was oriented north, but I was actually traveling west. A slight confusion. Then I noticed a much larger problem. The road that I had entered for next hotel was Okeechobee Road, but somehow or another that became the city and the map was set to take me back to the hotel that I stayed in a week ago in the town of Okeeechobee, and I was almost there!! Suffice it to say, my nice 2 to 3 hour drive turned into a grueling 8 hour drive without even a lunch break.

At least there was a nice Mexican restaurant within walking distance from my new motel. The hotel is one of the typical clusters of hotels and fast food joints at the intersection of large highways, with lots of big rig trucks everywhere you look.

Hopefully today with be a bit better. I am going to have to drive longer days if I am going to get back by mid-July.