Driving on Purple Streets

When I was doing free lance training in California, I had a contract to do two-days on communication at the California Bar Association Meeting, in San Diego. It may have been Spring Break, because I took Julie, who was about 17, with me. We did a day at the Zoo, some shopping, and mostly just acted like tourists when I wasn't working.

At the end of the first day, Julie and I were set to go out to dinner. As we had driven into San Diego, we had seen a Love's Barbeque about a block from the freeway, just before the exit to our hotel. I looked up the address in the phone book and checked a city street map. It was about eight blocks from the hotel over surface streets. Two blocks this way, turn that way, three blocks, turn the other way. Easy. I wrote the directions down, took the map with us, and off we went.

Except, when I had gone that three blocks, the street that was on the map wasn't there. I figured I'd go that way anyway, turn over on the next street, and intersect it. Nope. The next thing I knew, we were out in the canyon, nothing around except houses, and not many of those. I drove back towards civilization, stopped at the first 7-11 we came to, and asked for directions. Wrote what the young lady told me down, followed those directions, and ended up on the other side of the freeway, but no Love's, no street that Love's was on, no two streets leading to the street that Love's was on. Stopped at a gas station, where the young man explained that the map had streets in two colors -- the blue ones had been constructed, the purple ones were planned. I had been trying to drive on planned streets. However, it was easy to get to Love's -- take the freeway, take the first offramp to the right, and you would be half a block from it.

So, onto the freeway, get positioned in the right lane for the offramp and . . . there was a fork in the freeway before I reached the off ramp, the right fork went somewhere I didn't want to go, and the traffic was too heavy for me to change lanes in time. And then, there wasn't an offramp for 26 miles. Take the offramp, turn around, go back. We could see Love's from the freeway, except that we were on the wrong side. Since we were tired and hungry and I was getting a little toasted, we decided to do Love's the next night, when we would know how to get there, and eat at our hotel this night. Parked at the hotel, went into the dinning room. The host asked how we were doing, and I said, "Much better, now that we're here." "Have you been on the road long?" he asked. "Two hours," I sighed. "My. Where did you start?"

"Room 314," Julie answered.