Big Trouble in Abe LIncoln's Illinois

See what happens when a GPS system sends s unsuspecting driver into the back county of Illinoi.

Day One:  It is that day.  For at 9:00 am, Traveling PaPa Mike will be ‘On The Road Again’.  You see I am on my way to the Gateway City of St. Louis, Missouri.  It is 473 miles away, but I should be there before it gets dark.  PaPa Mike doesn’t like driving after the sun goes down.   The oncoming headlights make the road look like everything has a halo, it makes for a ghostly scene.  After leaving home, he is heading for Interstate 24.  It will take him all the way to St. Louis.  After driving for an hour though, his GPS begins to tell him to exit the freeway to a bypass, like maybe the Interstate is blocked just ahead forcing him to go around on the parallel side roads.  It seems all so simple, and no problems, right?  But, what happened over the next few hours might be said to defy logic, and getting back on I-24 should not have been such a big deal, right? 

“I don’t like the navigation system telling me to exit the freeway.  What would cause the navigation system to keep telling me to exit the interstate?”  Papa Mike is curious but not alarmed, the navigation system has done that before.  In fact, it had exhibited those same symptoms on his first ‘On the Road’ trip he had taken ten months earlier.  Strange correlation, but the explanation of this curiosity didn’t seem so insidious at the moment, he thought to himself.  “Side roads make me very nervous.  And, so far, the traffic is not heavy like I thought it would be.  The road’s surface is smooth and dry, and I’m on my way,” he said aloud, just in case he might have an as yet unseen travel companion respond.

But, the next thing I know I am seeing those insipient ‘work zone’ signs, and then comes the orange and white cones on the side of the interstate.  And, almost immediately, my auto-matonic, monotonic female voiced, guidance device began this once per minute instructional deluge of ‘Please turn right’ commands.  And, the closer I got to that exit the more demanding the woman’s voice became.  Again she says, “Turn Right at the next exit.”  I get right to the exit and the woman’s voice says, “Turn Right at this exit, turn right at this exit, immediate exit!!!”  But what she doesn’t know is that I am not believing that I should get off the interstate.  The woman on the GPS doesn’t know that I am obstinate, and hard to convince, at least for a while anyway. 

I have driven over 150 miles and passed through Nashville, Tennessee, me and the navigation system that has been telling me to get off at every exit for over ten miles now.  Since I’ve heard her voice so much I decided to give her a name.  ‘Robin’ comes to mind immediately.  You know like the side kick to Batman.  Only I have added ‘PT’ at the end.  He is always at Batman’s side making insightful recommendation and comments at every necessary opportunity.  So, I have ‘Robin PT,’ which is an acronym for ‘Robotic, Obnoxious, Bothersome, Idiotic Pathfinding Device’.  He does not care if he has hurt her feelings, because he is not about to leave the freeway for some road he hasn’t had time to study.  He knows where I-24 goes, but he does not know where this bypass goes or how long it will take to get there.  So, my intention was to just stay on I-24 until I get to Paducah, Kentucky.

But, in doing that I got the impression that something wasn’t working right with the navigation system.  I’m telling myself, “I’m 30 minutes from Paducah, and the navigator starts telling me to get off the interstate onto ALT-41.” I couldn’t be sure.  But as I neared Paducah, the intonations of the Navigator’s voice seemed, in my mind, to be coming with increasing frequency and with ever growing urgency of expression.  At the last second, before the exit to ALT-41 at Hopkinsville, the ‘navigator’ seems to be commanding me to get off (or like she would shut my engine off).  So, not being an obstinate person after all, I meekly complied and exited I-24, a road I knew, for a road I did not.

Well, I was off and headed into Hopkinsville.  And, as I drove into Hopkinsville, I knew I needed gasoline, so I needed to get off I-24 anyway.  I had to go to four gas stations in order to find a gas pump I could understand.  At each of the first three stations, each pump had three grades of gas, and each grade had two options:  100% gasoline, or 15% Ethanol blend.  I didn’t know for a fact which grade and/or blend I could put into the car.  And, on top of that, the first three stations I went to the pumps wouldn’t take either of my credit cards. 

Hopkinsville is a town I remember from my childhood.  I remember my mother always talking about that little rabbit town.  You know Hop, Hop, Hop, Hopkinsville.  I had lived six years in Paducah until I was eight years old.  So, Hopkinsville sounded familiar and I reasoned Paducah couldn’t be that far away.   It should have been the shortest distance to Paducah from where I was at.  The freeway should have been the fastest route to Paducah.  So, instead of turning around and going back to the freeway, I just kept following the Navigator’s driving commands.  Turn right here, then turn left immediately.  Turn left in 500 yards, then turn right after 300 feet.  My problem was now becoming obvious.  NOW, I had no idea how far it was to Paducah, Kentucky, nor how far it was back to Hopkinsville.  There were absolutely NO direction signs anywhere.  I just kept following the navigator’s turn instructions. 

As the day wore on, and I had been driving off of Interstate 24 for hours, I was getting increasingly concerned about getting out of this predicament I found myself in, and still making it to St. Louis.  As I was driving, I got to thinking about the place I was able to get gas in Hopkinsville.  At the fourth gas station I went to, where I was finally able to get gasoline, I saw another traveler getting gas.  I walked over to the lady and asked her if she knew how to get to St. Louis from here.  She said, “Go down this road about a mile, and turn right at the Wendy’s Restaurant just across the intersection at the traffic light.  I turned right on that road and began to confidently drive on toward what I thought was a road that was taking me to St. Louis.  It occurred to me that I had not seen a ‘St. Louis’ sign at that intersection.  But, I had found a Wendy’s at an intersection.  At the time, it seemed alright to me.  But, I never saw a sign the entire afternoon or evening that said Paducah, or St. Louis.  After driving on that road for about thirty more minutes, I finally saw a road sign.  It said ‘IL-127’.  As my heart sank in my chest and my stomach rose up into my throat, I knew one indisputable fact.   I WAS LOST.   This point would later lead me to an inescapable conclusion, a moral of the story, if you will.

Good thing I had been determined to get gas in Hopkinsville.  Robin, the digitized travel companion, that had gotten me so lost, was now just a passenger as I was ignoring her turn commands.  I had no choice, so I continued on this road for another 30 minutes and I was just sure that IL-127 would take me to an intersection, just over the next rise that would turn me left toward Paducah, or even St. Louis.  I was now eight and a half hours into a trip, I was lost, and my navigator was obviously not working properly.   My trip to St. Louis for that day was just to be an eight and a quarter hour long trip, according to the route planner I had found on the internet. 

It occurred to me at that time that I needed to find help.  But, I had driven so far into the country side of Illinois there was no one to ask and I hadn’t seen a house in miles.  I didn’t know what I was going to do next.  I was lost, and Robin was virtually asleep.  Robin the robotic navigating device had driven me more than an hour into the back country of Illinois, all the while telling me to make turns here and there. 

But, I knew this, it would be two days before I could get it fixed.  It was Saturday evening and there was no tech support to be found.  When the paved road turned to gravel, I knew I was in still more trouble.  I stopped the car and got out to look around.  I was now not only officially lost, but now I was also afraid.  I looked at my cell phone, there was no coverage.  And, just at that instant, my cell phone’s normal screen view, turned to red and in the center was the outline of a battery.  My battery was down to 21% and I would have to dig into the luggage in the trunk to find the bag that held the recharger cord.  But, with all the homemade rocketry in the trunk, I knew that digging around back there would not be easy.  I got back in the car, I backed slowly until I could turn around.  I couldn’t think anymore, my mind was now numb, and my level of despair was rising rapidly.  It was now 4:30 p.m. and the sun was well past high noon.   And, not to my surprise, but things were about to get decidedly worse.

As I drove out the way I had come into that area, something caught in my peripheral vision and I looked into the rear view mirror, and there it was.  A big, black SUV was right on my rear bumper.  Where it had come from I had no idea.  It had come from behind me and there had been no side roads or driveways.  Several minutes later, I had started to shake uncontrollably with fear.  It was at that moment that the car’s driver began blowing its horn at me.  Thinking that they just wanted by me, I slowed and eased to the side of the gravel road.  The big black SUV pulled up beside me and stopped.  A big burley looking man got out of the far side of the SUV, and came over to the window, and motioned me to roll it down.  He had a rather wild looking beard, and an even wilder look in his eyes.  He was wearing bib overalls, with a plaid shirt underneath.  He had on a hat with a rather wide brim that wrapped all the way around.  It had no labels on it, but I began to suspect that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.   I shook my head no, and asked him if he would just show me how to get out of the area.  I told him further I was trying to get to St. Louis, and needed directions.  He said that I was about to need more than that if I didn’t roll down the window.  It was then that the passenger side window of the Black SUV rolled down, and the passenger handed the man outside my window a shotgun.  He said that he would not ask me again.  So, under great distress and duress, I rolled my window down inch by inch hoping with each passing inch he would stop demanding that I roll it down further.  It was finally all the way down and the big burly man pointed the shotgun at me through the open window and demanded to know what I was doing there.  Then the situation got worse.  After just a few minutes, another car rolled up and two even bigger guys got out of the car and headed over to my window.

One of the two that got out of the car came to the passenger side of the car stopping adjacent to the front seat window.  The other man, went to the back of the Malibu.  The man at the window, said to me that if he had to ask me one more time he was going to make me sorry.  I told him that I had made a wrong turn somewhere and had driven up IL-127 until I was where they had just found me.  I said sir, if you would be so kind, could you just show me how to get to St. Louis from here. 

Without even blinking, he then demanded that I open up the trunk of my car so he could see what was inside.  I got out carefully and slowly, and went to the back of the car and pressed the trunk release key on the remote.  The lid popped up a fraction of an inch and I slowly raised it to its full open position.  When the big burley looking guy saw what was in my trunk he began to laugh.  His associate came around to the back to see what had been found that was so amusing.  When his friend came around the rear of the car and saw what was in the trunk he too began to laugh.  Then the third guy came around and he began to laugh.  He told me he hadn’t seen one of those things getting shot off since he was in elementary school.  I was so afraid. 

He said take one of those out of there and shoot it off.  Then one of the guys said there were more in the back seat.  It was full of them.  The big guy said, “Why don’t you shoot some of those off for me and my friends.”  He inferred that it might help my situation out.  So, I picked out a couple from the back that were duplicates of others.  I did that and pulled out the launcher, launch pad, and launch controller.  I set up the launch platform and mounted four of the rockets.  I set it up about thirty feet away and connected the wires to the igniters of the smallest of the rockets I had set up.  One at a time, I launched those four and then four more and then four more.  All at the command of my ‘captors.’  I had just lost 12 of my prized home-made rockets.  To my surprise the big burley guy told the other two guys to go fetch those rockets.  They were back inside thirty minutes with all twelve rockets.  He asked if I could launch them again.  I said yes but I would have to retrofit each one of them so I could relaunch, and then I’d have to find out if I had any replacement engines for them. 

I eventually ended up launching those twelve rockets a second time, and with the time it took to collect them again, I had been there for more than ninety minutes.  Then the big burley guy told me that he wanted to see one of those big ones go up.  I pulled out the Ventris and installed its engine, put it on the launch pad, attached the firing leads and with all of them counting down, when they reached zero, zero, I pushed the button, and the rocket rose quickly off the pad and into the sky.  I told him that this one was rated to 3000 feet.  And, I hoped that they could find it for me too, because I had something on the order of $100 in that rocket.  He didn’t believe me so I told him why:  its engine cost $27.50 plus sales tax, the Kit for that rocket was $45.00 plus shipping and tax, and there was an altimeter inside that I had activated that cost $33.00 plus tax.  That actually comes out to $106.50, plus shipping, and I would sure appreciate it if they would find it and return it to me.  He told his buddies to go find it and bring it back.  We had watched it go up and I had angled it into a lower angle for the launch so that it would fly through the wind and that it would come back in our direction.  It did come back at us but it landed about a half mile away.  They were back with it in ten minutes. 

I packed the rockets away and asked the big guy why he had pointed the shotgun at me and threatened me.  He looked down at my license plate and said, “Tennessee huh?”  I said I was.  He told me that he would get me out of here.  He explained to me that I had driven myself into an area that a few people knew to be a place where certain things were grown, and certain special teas were made.  He told me to follow him until he waived me around.  He told me that when he waived me around that I was on my own.  I followed him for about twenty minutes and then I saw him motion me to come around him.  There wasn’t anything said, I just floored the accelerator and got going as fast as I could.  Launching those twenty-five rockets had probably cost me over $150 in rocket engines, but at the moment I couldn’t think of any reason to be upset about it.  Those rockets may have kept me from getting a serious beating, or worse.

To my great surprise, after passing the big, black SUV, I immediately saw a St. Louis sign.  It said:  St. Louis 57 miles and a black arrow pointed the way.  It would be dark soon, but I had arrived in St. Louis, Missouri at 9:45 p.m.  I found my motel at 10:05 p.m. local time, and went into the office to get my room, and pay for it.  It had taken me 12 hours and 45 minutes to make it to St. Louis.  Travel time for the 473 mile trip was to be 7 hours and 52 minutes.  It had taken me nearly five hours longer and an extra 69 miles to make it to my destination.  But, I had learned my lesson that day about cross-country driving.  And here is where the first moral of the story arises:  If you have freeway between departure and arrival points, don’t get off the interstate if you don’t have to, unless Law Enforcement instructs you to get off. 

I never, in all my travels, went that way again for sure.  I just had no idea what was yet to intervene in my plans to drive to Oregon.  So, Traveling PaPa Mike is “Back on the Road Again,” and headed toward the great Pacific Northwest with no small amount of excitement to be experienced.  Oh, to be able to drive 2600 miles with no problems.  Was I dreaming, or did that really just happen to me.  It could have just been a nightmare.  I want to believe it was the latter.

 

This story, or was it a nightmare, is dedicated to my grandchildren:  Ella, Emma, Anna and Avva Stidham; and to my grandson Keller Goforth.  Well, I hope all of you enjoyed the story about my trip to Missouri, by way of Kentucky and Illinois.

 

 

THE MORAL OF THE STORY:

If you are riding a horse across a fast moving stream, and you and the horse are happy with your progress across the steam.  Do not become discontent with your current circumstance.  Never change horses in the middle of a stream!  

In this particular case, I let a computer convince me that I should get off the interstate highway and travel cross country on narrow two lane roads.  That was a mistake!  It had never occurred to me that the backroad would take so long and require so many turns; and worst, it did not occur to me that the navigator in the Malibu was programmed incorrectly.  It was just one little choice in the Setup Program.  In the Set Up for the Navigator, it asked ‘do you want to go the:  (1) the Fastest Route, or (2) the Scenic Route.  When the dealer had reset the navigation unit, the Scenic Option was selected.  In most cases, the ‘Shortest Route’ is also the fastest route; but the Scenic Route takes narrow two lane roads, and requires many more 90 degree turns, and turns cause the car to slow down significantly compared to interstate driving.  And every turn adds time to the transit, and slower speeds also require more time to cover the same distance.  Just because it is a computer doesn’t mean it is to be trusted.  It could be that the computer isn’t thinking the same way you are, and sometimes other people can make decisions about how a computer operates that you won’t know about until it is too late.  In my case, a mechanic, without asking the owner, ME, how I wanted the Navigator to select routes.  He chose the option that was most devastating to my cross country trip.  The reason for his choice was that a trip across country would be done in order to ‘SEE’ the most sites, not to get there in the quickest time.