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Please turnaround when possible…

Posted in Funny, Men and Women, Home on August 11, 2008 at 7:28 pm

I’m back from my hols safe, sound and slightly damp. Considering we normally go to mad places like The Lakes and Wales the English Riviera was disappointingly moist. We have had better weather in the afore mentioned rain traps but never mind we had a good time. Maybe because of the weather we did a lot of travelling about and this was my first holiday with a Sat Nav so I was quite interested in the difference it made. One thing was, I never quite got to grips with the local roads. It could be the location, I remember last year in The Lakes there seemed to be only one road where as Cornwall seemed to have 100’s - albeit very narrow ones. Maybe the whole county is ready for a one way system. However, I guess I didn’t stare at the map so much and when ever we went somewhere we seemed to take different roads even if we passed through the same places - weird.

The weirdest thing was trying to find the A34 north of St Austell. We were scudding along nicely when the Sat Nav suddenly said - “please turn around where possible” so we did but a few hundred yards down the road with no turn offs it said the same thing. Whoops. It seems we were crossing the road we wanted but on a bridge, there was no slip road and no Sat Nav instructions to leave the road we were on (presumably something like “please jump the fence and drive down the embankment where possible” probably in a Steve McQueen voice). Rather than spend the whole holiday playing Pong bouncing up and down the road we did resort to the map - tricky as we didn’t know where we were at that point.

What made the frustrating situation worse was the fact that we had switched to the specialist voices. My wife seems to have some antipathy to the Sat Nav which may be some lurking jealousy of me actually following another woman’s advice so we had John Cleese giving directions. We chose John Cleese because in the sample speech just as your thinking “Is this John Cleese or an impersonator?” he says “You’re wondering if this is really me so I brought my mother along. Mother is this really me?” To which suitable Monty Python old hag voice replies. We thought it was funny. What wasn’t funny was “Please turn around where possible. You are facing in the wrong direction, you need to turn your vehicle so it is facing the opposite direction that which it is now facing… “. Not several times in the same piece of road it wasn’t funny.