The map said the turnoff would add thirty-eight minutes. I remember the number because I said it out loud to justify the decision, the way you do when you already know you are going to turn. Thirty-eight minutes. That is nothing. That is one podcast episode. I turned.
I got back on the main road three hours and ten minutes later. Nothing dramatic happened. Nothing broke. I did not get lost in any real sense. The gap between thirty-eight minutes and three hours was made entirely of ordinary things I had not counted, and after that day I started counting them.
The map is measuring one thing and you are doing another
A routing app gives you drive time between two points. That is an honest number and it is almost never the number you need. What you actually spend is drive time out, plus drive time back, plus the time you are stopped, plus the time it takes to stop and to start again, plus whatever the detour does to the rest of your day.
The return leg is the one people forget most often, and I forgot it that morning. Thirty-eight minutes was the extra time on a loop, but the loop routing assumed I would continue forward from the far end. I did not. I doubled back, because the far end was a dead end road to a trailhead, which added the whole thing again. So the true floor was already over an hour before I had gotten out of the car.
Stopping is not free and neither is starting
Every stop has a lip on both sides. There is finding the parking, walking in, standing in the doorway working out how the place operates. Then afterward there is the bathroom, the water bottle, the thing you decide to buy, the conversation with somebody at the register, the return to the car, the reorganizing of everything you moved to get out of the car.
I timed this on purpose for a while last spring, on stops where nothing surprising happened. The lip runs twelve to twenty minutes, consistently, on top of whatever the actual stop was. Two detours in a day and you have quietly spent most of an hour on doorways and parking lots. It is not wasted exactly. It is just not counted, and uncounted time is the kind that makes you arrive late and cranky without being able to say why.
The compounding problem
The reason my thirty-eight minutes became three hours has less to do with the detour and more to do with what the detour pushed into. I got back on the road at one in the afternoon instead of eleven. That meant I hit the only town of any size right at the hour when its one main street backs up. That meant lunch happened at two, when I was too hungry to be patient, at the first place I saw, which was mediocre and slow.
Then I was tired in the way that comes from eating badly and late, so I stopped for coffee that I did not want at three. By the time I reached the motel it was dark, and the whole last ninety minutes of driving had been the joyless kind where you are just closing distance. The detour cost roughly an hour of actual detouring and about two hours of downstream consequences, and the consequences were the part that ruined the day.
The arithmetic I do now
I do a rough version of this in my head at the turnoff. Double the map’s added time, because of the return leg and because I will not drive it as fast as the app thinks. Add twenty minutes for the stop’s lip. Add whatever the actual visit is, and be honest, because if a place is worth driving to it is worth more than fifteen minutes.
For that trailhead the true number was closer to two and a half hours. Would I have turned if I had said two and a half hours out loud instead of thirty-eight minutes? Probably not that day. Some other day, absolutely, and that is the point. The arithmetic is not there to talk me out of detours. It is there so I am choosing a real thing instead of a comfortable underestimate.
Where the arithmetic stops applying
There is one situation where I skip the math entirely, and it is not the one you would expect. It is not when the detour looks amazing. It is when the driving itself has gone bad.
If I have been on a straight road for three hours and I can feel my attention getting flat, the honest calculation is that the next hour of driving is worth very little anyway. I am not going to remember it and I am not going to be safe in it. Turning off costs less than it looks like on paper, because the time I am spending was already low quality. Some of my best stops have come out of that logic, and none of them would have survived a cost accounting done at eight in the morning when I was fresh and ambitious.
What I tell myself at the turnoff
The question is not whether the detour is worth thirty-eight minutes. It is whether it is worth arriving at the motel after dark, whether it is worth eating lunch at two, whether it is worth the last stretch being a slog. Sometimes it plainly is. A friend I had not seen in years, a place I have wanted to see since I was twelve, a road that only exists in one direction.
But a moderately interesting thing four miles off the highway is usually not worth restructuring the second half of a day, and I spent years pretending otherwise because turning felt spontaneous and continuing felt like giving up. It is not giving up. It is just knowing what a day holds. I still turn plenty. I just do not tell myself it is thirty-eight minutes anymore.