Light At The End of The Tunnel

My cousin Bill and I decided that we would check on his vacationing sister's home this weekend. His sister Irene and her family are in the Philippines participating in a medical mission out there. Since Bill's girlfriend lives in New York, she decided to take the train (a two hour ride) from Manhattan to Baltimore. She's a great person, so I was excited to hang out with them both. We surfed Yahoo Maps, printed these instructions and then at 11:30 a.m. on Friday, we loaded up the minivan and headed north and then east to Maryland.

What I thought would be an easy trip, was not. First of all, Bill only printed out instructions to Irene's house. And then he printed up the maps from Irene's house to an Imax theatre in downtown Baltimore. I was thinking, by my guestimations we would make it to downtown Baltimore by 5:30. Bill's girlfriend Gladys would get in by train at about 5:55. This gave us a 20 minute edge. Everytime we have promised to pick her up at the station, we've been late--or should I say, he's been late, since he's usually the driver or at least the reason that we're late. I was relieved that we'd finally be getting to the station before her.

Did we make it on time? Nope. Somehow, Bill said he knew his way to the station. Since I don't usually drive while I'm there--one of my cousins always does the driving, I could only discern familiar landmarks. Not this time. For some reason Bill thought we had to go by Inner Harbor to get to the train station. I don't ever remember that route. Next while turing and twisting through downtown Baltimore, we ended up at some tunnel. I've never seen this tunnel before and I was hoping that the orange light it was emitting would somehow get us back on track. No such luck, when the orange light ran out, we were in some unrecognizable town--and it cost two dollars to get there. It cost us another two dollars to leave.

We finally got to the station because of some kind college student that worked at a gas station. He gave us step by step directions which led us to the station's front door. We were two hours late and Gladys just smiled saying, "men never admit when they are lost".

I can now say that I've been through every nook and cranny of Baltimore city.