Today, we traveled to the neck of the woods where I grew up. We know the trip so well at this point, we have our stopping places and our times and distances, and our inside jokes about all the sites we pass along the way. Today, however, through a series of not so relevant circumstances, we ended up on a completely different route, and consequently, we gave ourselves over to the wisdom of the GPS. If "Miss GPS" said "turn," we turned. If she said "take an alternate route," we did that too. And, thanks to "Miss GPS" and her instructions, we found ourselves in a part of my hometown that my kids had never seen before, and that I have had little contact with since my childhood (and not much even then). Before I knew it, both out of nostalgia and out of a desire to make light of the fact that our journey was suddenly taking forever, I was playing tour guide, explaining, "On your right is the place where we had my prom. It was kind of a disaster," and "On your left is the hospital that benefits from the thrift shop where we take the stuff we excavate from my childhood room every time we visit." Suddenly, what was a roundabout path in a longer than normal trip became a walk down memory lane, and a chance to share a bit of my history with my family. We still ended up where we needed to be, and my kids got a little better sense of how I grew up.
It is unlikely that we will take that route again. In lives as wall to wall as ours, there's not a lot of time for paths that take longer. So, all in all, I'm kind of glad we put ourselves in the hands of "Miss GPS" today. It appears that sometimes, a GPS (kind of like life) takes you not quite where it should, but exactly where you need to go.
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