By Chris Cole
Special to NKyTribune
As we approach the halfway point of my trusty Boy Scouts Handbook, we come to a chapter called Finding Your Way.
Unlike some other skills I’ve touched on in recent weeks, such as tying knots or forging steel, this is an area in which I’ve got some experience. I’m the driver in our family, and so it’s incumbent upon me to generally know where we’re going and how we’re going to get there.
Usually the second half of that equation is simple: I plug the address into my trusty GPS and we’re on our way. The first half isn’t nearly as easy as you might imagine. On an almost daily basis, I have to turn to my wife Megan – mid-trip – and ask, “Where are we going again?”
And I think my brain works a little differently from most people’s. At least I hope so. Because when Megan tells me we’re going to, let’s say Target (not that we’ve been doing much of that this year), I can’t just lock that in and drive to Target. That’d be too easy.
No, here is how the process works in my brain: “Target – OK, that’s in Newport. The new shopping center – well, newish. New compared to the old shopping center anyway. I’m glad to see they’re making upgrades to that old shopping center – it really needed it. Hopefully that Churchill Downs facility is nice. When the plague is over, we’ll have to check it out. I miss going to Cancun down there in the old shopping center. Their queso is so good.
Anyway, Newport. Yes, Target is off the same exit we take to get to B-Dubs. Man, I miss B-Dubs too. Stupid COVID. When this is all over, I’m spending a whole Sunday down there watching football. I wonder if Joe Burrow will be back by then, poor kid. I should try to grab him in my fantasy league next year. What was I doing? Oh yeah, Target. Newport. B-Dubs. I think that’s the hospital exit.”
Of course, by now, we’ve passed the hospital exit. I play it off by telling Meg I’m going around the back way, and she’s kind enough to accept that. And this is usually how we find our way.
I’d love to be able to chalk this up to old age, but unfortunately this is not a new phenomenon. In fact, I can trace my bad navigation skills all the way back to when I started driving or, as it were, navigating.
I remember this like it was yesterday. My best friend Brian, who I’ve written about a couple of times in this column, went to Northern Kentucky University with me and one day we decided to go to Empress Chili for lunch. This was back when Empress had a location right at NKU’s main entrance on US 27, where eventually, maybe there will be a mixed-use development complex…someday.
Anyway, we decided to drive separately, as Brian was heading home afterward and I had an afternoon class. I was still new to driving, having only recently purchased my first car – a manure-brown 1976 Buick Skylark that only picked up 700 WLW on the radio and had windows that wouldn’t go up or down. I don’t think I’d even driven on I-275 before, but that wouldn’t matter, given that I was only driving from one of NKU’s parking lots up Nunn Drive to Empress, right?
So we leave for Empress and somehow I make a wrong turn onto 3 Mile Road instead of US 27. For those unfamiliar, let me just say that 3 Mile Road and US 27 look absolutely nothing alike. One is a highway with businesses on both sides, multiple lanes in each direction and street lights every few feet; the other is a small road that basically connects NKU with I-275.
Even though I was supposed to turn right onto US 27, somehow I turned left onto 3 Mile and then somehow I merged onto I-275 headed west toward the airport. The logical thing to do in this circumstance would have been to get off the highway at the next exit in Wilder and then just circle back toward NKU.
And that’s probably what I was planning to do as I slowly made my way over to the left lane to exit. I truly weren’t no Boy Scout. By the time I realized that in Northern Kentucky the exits are on the right side of the highway, I was on I-71 headed south. Imagine my embarrassment when I had to call Brian from a gas station in Richwood and ask for directions back to campus.
GPS would have sure come in handy back then. But we can’t always rely on technology, which is why over this next week, I’m going to be learning how to navigate with a compass, how to read a map and even how to use the night sky to help me find my way. That will all be useful the next time I find myself lost in Richwood.
Until then, remember to Do a Good Turn Daily!
Chris Cole is Director of Enterprise Communications at Sanitation District No. 1 and a deacon at Plum Creek Christian Church in Butler. He lives in Highland Heights with his wife, Megan. The Man Scout chronicles Cole’s journey to acquiring some of the skills of the head, the heart and the hand he failed to learn as a child of the 1980s growing up in Newport. His field guide: a 1952 Boy Scouts Handbook he found on eBay.