How to Drive In Spain Part IV: Trust the GPS Until You Can No Longer Trust the GPS
The first time I drove through Spain it was before GPS was a thing.
I believe we were still on Mapquest back then. For those of you who are too young to remember, that meant using half a printer cartridge worth of ink to run off a series of maps and directions that would pile up and live the back seat of your car forever.
In Spain in 2007 my novia and I had no access to the bureaucracy of Mapquest, and instead used the traditional Rand McNally map that was so omnipresent then but goes ignored at gas stations everywhere today. That is to say we were mostly lost. Or at least lost much of the time, which provided its own thrills.
The addition of GPS changed everything.
Now it is possible to navigate massive, complex urban centers like Barcelona without having any idea how to get around. Then once you’re out in the countryside, it’s no problem to break off the highway to pursue mad hares as you please. Meander as you with without fear knowing that the satellites will remove the stress from regaining your intended route.
At least most of the time.
These days in the United States, GPS is pretty dependably current to whatever the road might be. In Spain, it is clear that their magic maps are sometimes behind the times when it comes to traffic changes.
For example, one of my off-route wanderings (through a seemingly nameless beach town that had the feel of a California gold rush camp gone bust) was going smoothly until I began attempting to follow the digital blue line back on track. At some point, it became quite insistent that the right way to go was the wrong way onto the freeway. It took a good deal of zigging and zagging to regain my route.
Later – a mere twenty miles outside my final destination of Granada, where I was soon to deposit the Audi at the Hertz office having not inflicted a scratch, or so I thought – I decided to pull off the highway to look at a particularly stunning low-Sierra Nevada landscape. Soon I found myself immersed in some eye feast of a national park, the road through which led me deeper and deeper into an undeveloped nothingness of nature. The GPS assured me that this road would carry me back to the highway some miles back from where I’d left it.
It wasn’t long before the road began to lose its composure. Uneven and ruddy, pocked worse than a high school pizza delivery boy’s acne scarred countenance, it began to feel like I and the Audi would soon be off-roading. But the GPS urged me on.
At some point I lost my faith in the GPS and the road, and began executing a narrow turning maneuver, careful not to let the tires of the car stray over the edge of the concrete as the venture beyond its bounds would mean endangering the Audi to the ditch.
Then it happened – once I had become perfectly perpendicular in the road, the integrity of its surface refused to hold true. It collapsed beneath my front end and the car plummeted forward.
At first the solution seemed to be a simple quick reversal, but not so fast! The front left quarter panel was caught on a large rock, and the sudden backtrack prompted it to dig in its teeth. I heard a terrible tearing sound, the car regained the surface of the road, but the damage was done – a sizeable bite had been taken from the Audi.
And this was not the only humiliation it was to suffer. The unexpected devastation had opened my adrenal floodgates, so my first reaction was to slam it into first then spur us out of there, but alas the road was still narrow, and our acceleration brought its right side almost flush against a fencing of pine trees, the branches of which clawed and tore at the Audi’s previously untarnished finish.
By the time I emerged from the state park and back onto the highway – screaming fast as if some horrible thing was after me – the car was in the condition I related above, ravaged and dragging a headlight like an eyeball plucked from its socket.
The GPS did a fine job of leading me to the Hertz office through the rush-hour Granada traffic. I pulled up in front and, seeing that the office was closed for siesta, vacated the tortured thing and left it there.