Yesterday was a pretty basic and typical day for us. We ran a few errands, but mostly we stayed at home, and unfortunately we spent most of that time inside. The drawback to Texas weather is that it's already getting scorching hot out there, not to mention the air quality has been terrible the past few days. Garrett's asthma can't take a lot of outdoors when the air quality isn't good, so that leaves us inside, fighting the boredom.
After putting the boys to bed last night, I mentally reviewed our calendar for the next several weeks and decided we needed to go do something fun before things get a little hectic (though a good hectic). I chose the Dallas Aquarium as our locale for today.
I'm not a professional downtown driver. I've driven around Dallas enough to have a basic idea of what roads go where (the main roads, not the city streets) and how to get to and from Keith's office building without getting lost. I've been to several places in Dallas over the years, but the majority of the time, I was just along for the ride, not the person responsible for getting everyone there without seeing the same buildings 5 times in a row because you can't figure out how to get out of the "one-way road maze".
I looked up the Aquarium's pertinent information along with their address, checked out the directions that Yahoo Maps would send me on (and wrote them down on a post-it note to stick in the middle of my steering wheel. Yes I did.) Then I programmed our GPS as my back-up.
I'm sure that last paragraph probably made little sense to you. Normal people would use their GPS and that would be the end of it. Don't get me wrong, I love GPS technology. I think it's great to not have to haul out a gigantic road atlas to figure out how to get from here to there. (How did drivers get themselves around without a navigator with those huge things? You couldn't look at an atlas and drive at the same time. I guess it was like texting and driving is today. You shouldn't do it, but you know there are people out there who do.) The thing that annoys me about GPS is that it says "turn 'right' now" when there are 3 different roads that it could technically be talking about. And ours doesn't audibly say the street's name when giving that direction, so you have to be sure you're looking at the GPS to be certain you're turning on the correct street and not the "now" street. Our GPS also can give some weird directions for how to get from here to there. I don't always trust that it's the most efficient route that it suggests.
So, the way I use GPS (because you all care very much) is for me to write down directions from Yahoo Maps (I don't know why I use that one specifically, but it's my personal preference. And I don't print out the directions because it's too much of a pain to drag out our printer and hook it up to the laptop. See? I love technology.) Then I program the GPS with the address of where we're headed, I ignore what the GPS says except to keep track of traffic conditions, but I have it as a backup in case the road is suddenly shut down or my directions don't work out for some reason. I know the GPS can take care of me if I suddenly end up on the wrong road. I just don't trust it to get me to where I'm going. I'm sure this is giving you more insight into "me" than you probably wanted to know.
The feature that I probably like the least on our GPS is the one where "she" says "Caution!" anytime you go more than 10 mph over the speedlimit. Garrett has caught on to what that means, so he always repeats her to me. Or he'll say "What did she say, Momma?" as if to remind me that I need to slowdown, without actually saying the words.
But back to our day. We had lots of fun at the Aquarium. The boys are pretty well behaved in situations like that. Cooper loved anything that was moving fast. He would get so excited. Garrett basically loved everything.
After the Aquarium, we headed over to see Keith at work and eat lunch with him. His building has a food court and ice rink on the ground level, so after walking through and saying hi to all of his coworkers, we went down to the food court, picked up McDonald's for the boys and Corner Bakery for us and went back up to eat our lunches in the conference room. Most of Keith's coworkers joined us and all but one of them are childless so they got an upclose look to what it's like to eat lunch with 2 small children. It was honestly hilarious.
We had a really fun outing and I now feel confident in my Dallas driving and post-it note GPS abilities.
