I have learned that my confidence often exceeds my actual knowledge. Sometimes this doesn’t matter. But when driving, it’s mighty handy to take a glance at that map or fire up that GPS just for a moment, and find out generally where I’m going, before I head there, even if I’m pretty “sure” I know where I’m going.
Category: Travel
There’s Waldo
Is this a cool idea or what? A new business colleague of mine ALWAYS wears a wild Hawiian shirt on the way home from business trips. The whole team changed into play clothes for the journey but this guy does it up. They say this way they can find him in the airport, but I think it’s a great way to say “off duty!”
Check the Boards
I learned that it’s worth checking out the airport website to see if there are earlier flights that you could catch if you just knew about them. Otherwise, it could mean arriving at the airport just 30 or so minutes too late to get a flight 90 minutes earlier that the scheduled one, which just could have resulted in missing Holiday Weekend Traffic on I-93 North. So maybe get home more than three hours earlier.
GPS Not the Cow Path
On this day, I learned multiple lessons about using a GPS. The first few are obvious – or at least they are now:
Be specific about the address! Winthrop Street is by Logan Airport, and is nowhere near Winthrop Square in Downtown Crossing. There are at least three different Summer Streets in Boston, in three different places.
Check out the GPS map view or the whole sequence of directions before you start out. Then you can pick the one to which you would actually care to go!
And this is the big one of the day: Even though it sounds like a good solution for navigating the one-ways, forget using a GPS in Very Old Boston! The Fanueil Hall area, complete with 200+ year old paved cow paths, twists and turns and small angles, seems to have named (but not labeled) roads that not distinct enough for my Garmin GPS. It freaked out! It went into an incoherent rant that went something like this as I crawled through traffic: “Turn right on Milk Stree.. recalculating turn left on [something] str… recalculating.. recalculating… turn left on .. recalculating…” Well you get the idea.
Gating Factor
Check the departure gate, and then GO there and confirm it, and leave plenty of time to do it.
I had one gate listed on my boarding pass (no one should believe that one), then another on the screen – different concourse – and then a third that was the Truth. So this all takes time. Find it first, then hang out.
Years ago I also learned (OK, twice) that you have to be at the actual gate, not the next number. Because the distance between Gate 25 and Gate 26 can be a tram.
What travel lessons have you learned, by doing it right or the hard way? Post a comment here.
Jane's Lessons Learned 