One of the best inventions of the past 20 years has been the GPS, Global Positioning Service. A GPS allows someone with internet access to find anything on a map – a city, a highway, a restaurant.
The service on my phone shows road construction, radar stations and heavy traffic. The only drawbacks are if I’m in a remote location and the GPS signal is lost and the inability to see the big roadmap picture.
Sometimes, I want to see all of the city instead of one route, but that complaint is miniscule compared to the good that I get out of modern technology.
My mom and I took a trip from Baton Rouge up to my sister’s house in Alexandria, located in central Louisiana. Interstate 10 has become a nightmare with stalled traffic, endless road construction and 18-wheelers that blast regular cars off the road. I try and avoid I-10 whenever possible.
For the trip to Alexandria, we took the old highway, 190, through some small towns over to Interstate 49 north to Alexandria. It’s a pleasant drive although the concrete on 190 is rough on tires and there’s not much to see past shut-down nightclubs and gas stations.
Mom and I had a terrific visit with my sister, her husband and three of her five grandchildren. Because I don’t like to drive at night, we decided to leave late in the afternoon. At the end of my sister’s driveway, I put our ending location in the GPS system, and off we went.
I saw the entrance for Interstate 49 coming up, but the GPS had me travel further on the highway we were on and meander down the state instead of going out of our way to the interstate. My mom pointed out the turn, but I explained what I thought the GPS had in mind.
After about 30 minutes, it was obvious we were on a different highway than what I’d thought we’d be on.
“You missed the turn,” my mom said. “Maybe we ought to go back.”
By this point, we were a good 40 miles away from the interstate, and I didn’t want to double back. The GPS had us headed in the right direction, so I decided to stick with technology.
“We’ll be fine,” I told her. “The GPS knows what its doing.”
Instead of a crowded interstate highway, we were on a smooth, two-lane country road. We drove past acres of sugar cane, their tall stalks swaying in the wind underneath a blue sky packed with puffy white clouds.
Instead of name-brand gas stations and convenience stores, we saw small towns with local hardware and mom-and-pop stores.
Weathered signs offered home-grown watermelons and vegetables, and trucks, their fenders speckled with mud, filled the parking lots.
Tidy homes greeted us along the way, the siding painted in different hues of white, yellow and beige. At almost every house, flowers dotted the neatly trimmed yards and most of the back yards had swing sets or trampolines.
I saw a few clothes lines in the yards, and some had clothes swaying in the wind. The crops changed from sugar cane to corn, and I marveled at the endless rows of tall stalks of corn reaching for the sky.
There were massive live oak trees, their elderly trunks thick and dark. They seemed to hug the homes underneath their sprawling branches. A gently rolling levee separated the simple houses from the river, and I thought about how close the people here were to nature.
Sure, we could’ve taken the interstate and gotten home about 10 minutes earlier. But we took the comfortable back roads through towns that had stood guard for dozens of years. The trip was relaxing, and the sights gave us a chance to talk about the old days and how her grandparents and parents made life work through the good times and the hard times. That was a conversation we might never have had not we traveled the comfortable, country roads of central Louisiana.
Perhaps the GPS knew what it was doing all along.
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.