The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

The woman who provides the voice for the GPS on my cellphone is named Noreen. I’m not sure how I know this, I just do. I also know she wears her hair in a beehive and wears eyeglasses with severe 1950s schoolteacher frames. But she’s not a schoolteacher. She used to sit at a steel desk in the secretarial pool at a massive government contracting company, then she was an operator for AT&T, but now she works for Sprint, providing turn-by-turn directions to people like me, who only want a decent cup of coffee.

And Noreen, you failed. Go ahead and blame the overcast conditions, say it was the satellites’ fault, but I blame you.

Danielle, Sean, and I fled from Newport a day ahead of schedule because of the Nor’easter riding up the East Coast. Early predictions had it causing problems mainly for the Mid-Atlantic states, but now it looked to be tracking all the way north to ruin our travel plans. We had planned to have Saturday as a preparation day and Sunday and Monday as travel days. Instead, when we saw the weather reports and heard from friends in D.C. who had 18 inches of snow (and counting), we started packing right away to get on the road Saturday afternoon. We plotted a new course that would take us north of the projected snow, and we were off.

We stayed the night in Syracuse, and it was the next morning that the twenty-first century failed us. The satellites couldn’t find us. We knew there must be a Starbucks in Syracuse, but the hotel was located in a strange sort of hotel ghetto. There was nothing else around us except farmland. Danielle thought it best to just hit the highway and keep an eye peeled for good coffee. As she drove, I tinkered with my phone. We were both underpowered, having had only one cup each of hotel joe. Weak fuel indeed.

When the skies cleared a little ways down the road, the map revealed numerous Starbucks locations, all behind us in Syracuse. There seemed to be one a little ways ahead of us, though, and we would need gas, so we made for it. We filled up and let Noreen take us miles off the highway. When we were within a mile, neither Danielle or I thought it looked good. This was still farm country.

Sure enough, Noreen had led us to the back gated entrance to a New York Thruway service area. What was worse, once we’d gotten back on the highway, thinking the next service area would be our salvation, we discovered the one with the Starbucks was on the eastbound side, and we were heading west.

We cursed Noreen, and we cursed her silicon brain. Didn’t she know what a highway service area was?

We were approaching the Rochester, NY, metropolitan area. Abandoning Noreen, I searched Google Maps and found a promising listing just off the highway. Google led us to a mall. Thankfully, there was a Borders across the street. A Borders with a café.

To be continued