Detours

For years I planned trips with no room in them and then felt guilty every time I wanted to stop. Here is the buffer I build into a driving day now, and why the number is bigger than it sounds.

Both turns looked the same from the road. One gave me an afternoon I still think about, the other gave me a locked gate and a headache. Comparing them is the only way I have found to learn anything.

Everyone says take the small road. I did that for a whole summer and kept notes. The small road is better at some things and genuinely worse at others, and pretending otherwise makes for bad trips.

The driver decides where the car goes, which means detours get made unilaterally and resented quietly. A few things I learned about negotiating a turn with the person sitting next to me.

A detour that looks like forty minutes on the map is almost never forty minutes. Here is the arithmetic I now do before I turn, and the trip where I got it badly wrong.

A plywood sign with an arrow and a mileage number got two hours out of me for almost nothing. Here is what I have learned about which roadside signs are worth a turn and which ones are just paint.