How to Navigate Directions: A Guide for the Directionally Challenged

            I’m not good with directions.  In fact, I’d have to improve considerably to even be bad.  Useless terms like left, right, North, South, East, and West annoy me.  If people actually expect me to get somewhere, they need to be more specific.  “Turn off the interstate at exit 5.  Go the opposite direction you’ve been going and go three streets past Brookshire’s.   Drive just a minute or so and you’ll see a restaurant with the big cow in the parking lot.  Don’t turn there.  Drive to the next red light and turn on the street that turns between the WaWa and that hardware store with the inflatable lumberjack.  Watch for the ugly house with the silk flowers in the bucket of that tacky wishing well.  Pass it up, but now you need to start driving pretty slow.  You’ll see a big, old white house with a deep porch and all those ferns, kind of like the one Grandma lived in at Houston, the one where the woman living upstairs tossed her dirty mop water out on my head when I was sitting on the sidewalk playing. Boy, did Grandma have something to say to her!  Remember, it was just across the street from that big, old funeral home.   I just love those old houses, but I’ll bet they are expensive to heat.  About six houses down on the other side, there’s a little, blue house. I believe it used to be gray. If you look hard, you’ll see an old rusted out 1950 GMC like Aunt Ada and Uncle Junior used to drive, up on blocks way off to the side of the shed.  Remember how they used to toodle around with all those mean boys bouncing like popcorn in the back?  Anyway, our house is the yellow one with the big shade trees just across from it.  You can’t miss it. There’s a bottle tree out front.”

            Now I can’t miss with those directions.

21 thoughts on “How to Navigate Directions: A Guide for the Directionally Challenged”

  1. Oh, that’s bad, that’s very bad, sister…

    I too have no mental relationship with the directions of the compass (wha~?) but at least I’ve managed to master “right” and “left”!

    … On the other hand, if you tell me to get off at Exit 5, it’s pretty much a guarantee there won’t be one. There will be an Exit 6. There will be Exits 4, 4.5, 4.75, and 4.9999999. But there will NOT be an Exit 5.

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  2. Hell yeah this is me, don’t tell me to go south which is south I have no bloody idea, don’t just tell me to turn into first street if first street is in fact the fourth street I will come to because I will get confused and will have no idea where to turn.

    Also since I am Australian people need to remember that if I say it’s just up the road that could mean it is either 2 minutes away or 2hrs away, just saying.

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  3. I have no sense of direction and it doesn’t help when people give you stupid instructions. I was once told to turn left at the ‘church on wheels’. Needless to say, I couldn’t find any such thing. I also hate the way everything looks different on the ground to the aerial view you get on a map.

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