This weekend, I had the greatest of plans. My Best Friend was supposed to come up for the weekend since it was her birthday. So I took great care to have my Roommate and the Suitemates sign the guest pass a week in advance, and bright and early Monday morning I turned it in to the office. I swear I did. So her Brother drove her all the way from bumblefuck Friday afternoon, and he hung out with us all day. Come 8 pm when guest passes are supposed to show up, there wasn't one for my Best Friend. Her Brother was sick of us and wanted to go home, but couldn't until we got her a new guest pass. After numerous phone calls and forms and people, and after everyone was frustrated with me, I decided to randomly look in my backpack for something, only to find... the guest pass I never turned in! Woohoo! (Thank you to all the wonderful people in the Hillside office who helped me get a new pass that night!) So, presumably, life should be good again, Brother can go home, and we can start our wonderful weekend. Haha.
Since Brother is from bumblefuck, which isn't very close to William Paterson, he didn't know his way round very well, and wanted directions back to Parkway south. Roommate tried to give directions, but some of the turns were uncertain, and amongst the five of us that were standing around Brother's car, we couldn't figure this out. So we decided to hop in Roommate's car and have Brother follow us to Parkway south. We got there no problem. We were approaching the turnoff for Parkway south, and wondering if Brother in car behind us would be smart enough to follow the few remaining signs and make the turn off by himself, or if we were going to have to actually TAKE the exit and end up on the Parkway ourselves. Cursing ourselves for not having cell phones, we finally compromised by having Boyfriend hang out the front passenger window, pointing frantically at the exit while Roommate honked her car horn. Best Friend and I simply watched and laughed. Brother safely took the exit he should have, leaving the four of us to find our way back to campus. Again I say, "Haha."
One would think that the easiest way to get home from somewhere would be to follow the same path one took to get there, backwards. Well guess what. This is NOT an episode of Seventh Heaven, and problems do NOT get solved in sixty minutes or less. We drove straight for a while, looking for U-turn signs. Then we took a bunch of wrong turns and wrong roads and some other things that the non-driving Diversity Editor paid no attention to, until we were positively and utterly lost. So we were driving around, debating the wisdom of digging under the seat in the dark to find a map, when "out of the hazy mist on a dark and stormy night" came a... dragon! Wait, wrong story. It wasn't a dragon, it was a Barnes & Noble! We were just driving along, trying to find something vaguely familiar looking, and this TWO-STORY Barnes & Noble appears. Best Friend and I (both English majors), as well as Roommate (resident bookworm) all kinda went "Oooooohhh..." at the bookstore. Boyfriend kinda hissed at it. We drove on, commenting that we'd have to get lost up there again some time.
The next thing to leap out at us was a Medieval Times Restaurant, which caused everyone in the car but me to "Ooooohhh" again. I've never been to Medieval Times, I don't understand the hype about it, and I was tired and crabby and lost at this point in time. Nonetheless, we agreed it was a noteworthy landmark, worth further investigation, some hypothetical day when we weren't lost.
Then we took a bunch more wrong turns. Finally we saw familiar territory - signs for Route 46! "East or west?" Roommate asked. At which point all four of us in the car proceeded to give a different answer, which is really interesting, since there were only two options. Well, whichever way we picked, it was the wrong way. So we proceeded to look for yet another U-turn, which led us to yet more wrong turns onto streets we never knew existed, thus repeating the whole getting lost process once more.
So what wisdom do I have to bestow upon my loyal public as a result of this experience?
1. College students cannot give or take directions.
2. Bookstores make everything better.
3. No matter how hard you try, two lefts do not, I repeat, DO NOT equal a right.