Saturday, December 29, 2007

My Vacation in a few hundred words...Part 1: The GPS story

Our vacation started by a trip to Tampa to visit my dad's long lost friends. Apparently, they never saw each other for more than 20 years! So basically for the first whole day, I just sat there and smiled...except that our GPS and a hotel person sort of, uh, misled us.

The GPS story or the Story of the Lost:

For Black Friday this year, we went and bought a Mio GPS for the price of 150 bucks. It was a pretty good deal as it included a 4.3'' wide screen and MP3 player. On the next day, we went to Jacksonville and it worked it's magic pretty well, that's where it all went down hill...

Our hotel on the first day is a La Quinta on US 19 NORTH (this is very important) in Clearwater. So we followed the GPS:

Turn right in a hundred yards. Keep right. Arrive at destination...
and when we got to the place the GPS guided us, there was no La Quinta Inn. We thought we got to the middle of US 19 so we started driving north as the street names all said US19 South. We then called the hotel and the hotel receptionist told us to keep driving (but never which direction), so we kept driving. An hour later, we reached Tarpon Springs, a small city north of Clearwater, we got worried and called the hotel again. Now they said we drove too far...but we never saw a La Quinta. We finally got to the hotel by following our friends car.

From hindsight, I found out that we there are TWO US19 North... when we got to US19, we were on the South sandwiched between them so we thought traveling north was right. Turned out going south may lead you north.

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