I Know Where I Am

While we were in Utah recently, we wanted to go up to the This Is the Place monument, which is now a heritage park. It's been a long time, so I couldn't remember exactly what street would get us all the way from downtown Salt Lake up there. We were driving our red Saturn which the girls have in Provo. I asked Janet where the atlas was. She said, "Map? There's no map in here." That made me laugh. They drove all the way from Wausau, WI to Provo, Utah without a map. I started thinking about it. I think that all of our immediate family (not sure about the in-laws) could drive quite a few places across country without looking at a map--for example, from Mt. Vernon to Provo, or from Mt. Vernon to Aberdeen, or from Wausau to DC or Memphis.

For some reason, being geographically oriented is a talent in our family. Once I went on a Relief Society temple trip to St. Paul. On the way home, the driver missed the exit from I94 to WI29, which is about halfway through the trip. The next exit was 15 miles down the road in Eau Claire. When we got there, almost everyone was in favor of just turning around and going back up to freeway to the right exit. I said no way, we can do better than that. We found a big road going east, then one going north and lo and behold, we ended up right on 29 about 15 miles east. Everyone was amazed at my ability to figure that out. (Obviously, it doesn't take much.)

We usually do take an atlas with us when we travel. But we use it for things like finding the next rest area, playing the State game, or dreaming about where we'd like to go next. And I have to admit, when we get to a big city we've never been to before, we sometimes get a little lost. But once we've been somewhere, we usually never have trouble again.

Maybe it's because we traveled a lot when the kids were little. In the eastern half of the US, things of interest are a lot closer, so we have been lots of places. In fact, I've been to 40 states and the District of Columbia. Not as many places as our friend Harvey, who required extra pages for his passport, but a pretty respectable number. And by the way, we reached the This Is the Place monument just fine.