Aud is studying abroad in France next year, and we just got back from a trip to D.C. to get her a visa. (Which, by the way, has been paperwork hell, and I say this as a relatively unbiased bystander.)
The trip was an adventure.
(Incidentally, it's going to sound like I'm totally dissing Aud's driving, but I promise, if she were telling this story, she'd do it the same way. Besides which, 90% of this was totally not her fault, and for every 'doh!' moment, there was at least one moment where she admirably pulled out of a tricky situation.)
Like me, Aud is from a very rural area. Unlike me, for her 'rural' means '30 minutes out on a dirt road'. She's really not comfortable with driving in cities. Or anything resembling traffic. Or crowded parking lots, really. At any rate, she's fine with highway driving, but hitting D.C. was interesting, especially since we were working from Mapquest directions, which are a step above 'well, that looks like a suburb', but not a very big one.
Also, Aud's not too clear on the difference between right and left.
To start with, the first thing after we got off 29, we had about ten seconds to make sense of three steps on the Mapquest directions, and of those, two were either unnecessary, or so obvious that telling us about it just made things confusing. This left us sitting in a very busy intersection, with the light turning green and people honking behind us. We needed to turn left. Between the honking and the heat of the moment, Aud got rattled and ended up sort of trying to go left and right at the same time, regardless of lines on the road. Me sitting next to her yelling, "No, left! LEFT! At least get in a lane!" probably didn't help much.
We survived the intersection, and the cab honking behind us survived having to wait ten seconds to get through his green light. Jerk.
Then, when we turned off of the highway into what Aud calls Suburban Hell, the road Mapquest wanted us to take would have had us driving through a house. So, we tried the 'well, that looks kind of right' method and managed to find the right road, but with no idea which direction to go on it. We were supposed to turn on a road called Greenbrier.
We passed a lot of roads that were not called Greenbrier, and one road with a missing street sign. As we passed it, Aud said, "I sure hope that's not Greenbrier." I agreed. We kept driving. No Greenbrier. We decided we'd gone too far and turned around to go the other way. Still no Greenbrier, but we did pass the road with no sign again. Aud said to just watch, it would be that one--Murphy's Law,
In the end, she called our host, and he led her on a merry little tour trying to place our location on a map, which sent us in a big circle to end up exactly where we had been. Fortunately, in Suburban Hell, you can stop in the middle of the street without getting honked at, although you may get funny looks from kids with soccer balls or golden retrievers. Anyway, once he'd pinpointed where we were, he got us going down the same road for a third time and told us which intersection to turn at for Greenbrier. Can you guess which one it was?
If you guessed 'the one with no street sign!' you get a cookie. Or a dorkslap. That was about when the hysteria set in, really.
You don't even want to know what it was like for us navigating the D.C. bus system. Aud did get her visa, though.
