I Miss Getting Lost

Smartphones have made traveling immeasurably easier. And I don’t think that was entirely free.

Almost 25 years ago I was in a city that wasn’t my own. I’d never been there before. I was there along with my best friend, who lived in a different city, opposite ways from mine. We traveled there by bus to meet with a web design client.

When we arrived we met at the bus station and took a cab to the hotel restaurant where we were meeting with the client. The meeting went well. After lunch, we had plenty of daylight left and we were in a good mood, so we decided to walk back to the bus station and to use the time to catch up on each other’s life.

Except we were in an unknown town, and we didn’t have smartphones (there were a good five or six years left for them to be invented) or internet access. So of course we got lost.

We walked for two or three hours, and had to stop a couple of times for a snack before biting the bullet, swallowing our pride and taking a cab to the bus station. On the way there, we passed the hotel restaurant shortly before arriving at the station.

We turned a fifteen-minute walk into a three-hour trek through an unfamiliar and not very pleasant city.

And of course, we laughed our asses off.

It was an adventure. I'm still smiling about it two and a half decades later.

We caught the bus.