Pittsburgh is for Garmin lovers

One thing about da burgh is that you will get lost when you drive.  It’s inevitable.  And though we don’t own a Garmin, yet, we do consult google maps on a daily basis. 

I must also preface this post by mentioning the fact that I do have a keen sense of direction.  I worked as a pizza delivery driver in college.  I drove into cities and town all over the U.S. as a children’s theater tour manager.  It’s an odd phenomena for me to find myself lost, even in a new city.

It’s not so much that the roads are all that confusing in da’ burgh, though they do twist and turn around hills.  It’s just that the route to your destination is rarely the same route back.  And once you get lost on the way back, there can be this compounding effect and the next thing you know, you’re in Cleveland.

For example…

The Doctor and I are heading out for a late night theater show downtown.  We give ourselves plenty of time to get there (a ten minute drive) and find parking.  I’ve looked it up on the map and the route seems easy, so off we go.  I drive down the 376 heading east and get off downtown, heading towards Liberty.  Only problem is there’s construction, and it’s dark, and I have no idea which of the five intersecting streets I end up is actually Liberty.  So we end up going on a different road and the next thing I know I’m driving up a ramp and I’m on a bridge headed to the north side.  This isn’t good, I think.  So I get off the bridge and try to figure out where I am. 

There’s a big building that says PNC park.  Ah, that’s helpful.  I turn the car around and think to myself, “I’ll just get back on that bridge and get right back downtown.  How hard can that be?”

But there doesn’t seem to be a way to get back on that bridge.  We end up driving under it.  Then I end up on another ramp, which although the ramp was leading south to downtown, turns us around and now we’re driving north on the 279 freeway in the HOV express lane, the nearest exit 12 miles away.  We finally get off the freeway god knows where and consult the map.  The Doctor and I switch places so she can drive and I can navigate.

I figure out how to get us back on the 279 and I think how to get back downtown.

You’re probably thinking, wow, that’s rough.

But it gets worse…

Because of construction, we can’t access the bridge we needed to take (well, we could’ve taken a different route or different bridge but I didn’t know that at the time), and so we end up on the wrong bridge and are now on the other side of the river from downtown, following the most bizarre trail of detour signs.  Finally, we arrive to the entrance of the tunnel to the Fort Pitt bridge, get across the river,  and at last, are driving down Liberty, where we are met with more construction signs and it seems we can’t drive down Liberty at all, so we have to think fast and go around and around, until finally, we just park the car.

The ten-minute drive turned into forty-five minutes of anxiety where we got to traverse not one, but all three rivers.  Luckily, we still made it to the show.

My father-in-law says he’s getting me a Garmin for Christmas.  I think that might be too late to prevent any other mishaps.