Tomorrow I am leaving on a trip. I am abandoning my family for the open road and the search for the perfect yarn store. I go on a few trips like this a year. I am not alone in my quests; I have a friend, who shall remain nameless for the time being. We have to decide on the best pseudonym for her, we will discuss it during the many hours we will be on the road. We thought about Thelma and Louise but that tends to bring up images of murder and cliffs, we don’t want to go there.
The trips we go on are for fun, we usually have a final destination in mind and eventually get to where we are intending to go. We don’t always take the most direct or time saving route. One trip we took was a 4 hour drive that took us 10 hours to do. We saw yarn and quilt stores along the way and were drawn to them like moths to a flame. We have a Garmin which we have renamed Carmen who gets very upset with us. If you have ever programmed a Garmin for a destination and then not followed her directions you would know she gets VERY upset. She starts telling you, in a very sarcastic voice, to make a u-turn NOW. If you keep going the “wrong way” she gets more aggressive and starts “recalculating” to find you a new way back to the intended destination. We are actually on our second Garmin, I think the first one got so fed up with us, it just gave up and decided it would no longer hold a charge so it would not have to deal with us. Mike would say it was just a machine and could not get upset with us, but I know she secretly enjoyed when we made a sudden turn and she could yell at us. I also think the old one and the new communicated before we left on our last trip. We were at a yarn store, off the path of course, and she was yelling at us to get back to the main highway and she gave us directions to do so, but she instead lead us right into the middle of a trailer park. After we got our breath back from laughing so hard we managed to find our own way back to the highway and continue on down the road. On that trip we also had a small problem when the technology in the car started fighting and we were no longer in control. What was that about computers eventually taking over, never mind Hal? We were trying to make a call with On-star and Carmen decided to tell us where we had gone wrong once again. On-star did not like her interrupting and yelled at us to get rid of the background noise if we wanted to speak to her. Quite an odd experience having the on-board computers gets into a catfight.
Tomorrow we are on our way to see friends in Illinois. We plan to spend one day traveling to Galena Ill. It is a 9 hour trip as per Carmen. We will see what happen. We will spend the night there and hit the local yarn store and see what else we find. I will keep you all posted as we go. I suppose I should go to bed so I can get up and be ready for a full day of pissing off Carmen.
