Country Roads

Today

Yesterday we set out from Wellington to drive to Napier on the East side of North Island. Plugged in Dolly the sat nav and off we set. After she’d taken a little time, during which Paul drove around hopefully in the wrong direction, to place herself, she began lisping out the turns.

Very good she was, too. In fact she’d have been better if I hadn’t been also reading the map and had a disagreement with her over whether to head straight up the SH2 (my preference) or continue on SH1 (hers).

I overruled her and thereby added about 30km to the journey. More scenic, tho’ which is my excuse to which I’m sticking.

Dolly’s (well, doesn’t everyone have a name for their sat nav person?) particularly useful in cities where it’s easy to become confused. But she’s not very intuitive and we found that she got so muddled on some very tight hairpins near Queenstown that she kept thinking we were heading the wrong way and instructing us to do u-turns.

In My Day

I absolutely love maps and am living proof that women can read them. I probably got this from Mamma who had a huge store of OS maps. She used these to guide us on our country walks. There’s a picture in our family
album of Mamma leaning on a stile, somewhere near Godalming, clutching a map with a faraway look in her eyes.

She used to dive off the lanes along paths that had previously been invisible to us, exclaiming “Ah! That’s the footpath!”. She would then lead us confidently along what to my eyes was just a clear patch of woodland or the very muddy edge of a ploughed field.

I think she frequently got lost and our best chance of reaching our destination was if it was a very well-signposted National Trust site or something similar. Daddy’s nickname for her on these occasions was “The Never-get-there”. I don’t know whether she was very pleased by this, but I also noticed that Daddy opted out of the whole direction finding thing entirely.

In my own forays I tend to stick to the lanes, unless the path is very clear and free of mud. It’s safer and quicker!