And so it came to be that, on Labor Day, Tuck peed on the bed and Samson gutted a bag of garbage all over the back yard and my wife commanded that I go urinate so that we could drive to San Francisco. She’d had enough of life around the house for one day and, as is often in character, needed a road trip.

We’ve been to the city a few times since I first arrived in California. San Francisco’s a beautiful town: breathtaking views, great weather, interesting people, lots to see and do. We’d spent the first night of our honeymoon at Parc 55; when we drive into town, we usually try to find something that we hadn’t seen together before. It’s usually not hard to turn up something.

Anyway, so my new inlaws gave me/us a car GPS system for my birthday – in case you haven’t encountered these before, a GPS system is basically a computerized map. You plug it into the cigarette lighter, slap the suction cup onto inside of the windshield, and let the gadget talk to a satellite and figure out just where in the heck you are. You can then plot a route to wherever you want to go, and as you drive the unit gives you directions there, tracing your trip out in real time on a moving visual map. It’s cool as all hell.

And it was a godsend around here for me. Almost a year on and I still barely know my way around. So when I need to go to the bank and can’t remember the way, I just take the GPS with me – we have our bank bookmarked as a favorite spot. Tap the screen a couple times and off we go.

Of course we took it with us to San Francisco. We were both tired and neither of us felt like navigating and we just wanted to get there already. Shortly after we got onto the freeway, I started setting the waypoints for the city. Kristi recommended Golden Gate Park.

Okay.. set.. points of interest.. city.. San Francisco. There we go. Okay. Category, parks and recreation. Ah, here we are: Golden Gate Park. SET.

Screen flashes off. Unit reboots. Waypoint not set.

Huh? Okay, try again. Reboots a second time.

“Hon, it won’t let me set Golden Gate Park.”

“You’ve got to be doing it wrong,” she says. “Did you set category, points of interest, parks?”

“Yep. It just shut off and rebooted.”

So we try this three more times and it still won’t set the waypoint. Finally Kristi says, “Okay, fine, look up the Museum of Modern Arts. No – it’s called the Palace of Fine Arts. Might be in there as the Exploratorium.”

I check the category listings for San Francisco. “There’s no category here for museums or anything like that. There’s ‘Tourism Points of Interest’.”

“That’s where it’d be. Look there.”

Tap. Boop, beep.

“According to this,” I say, “San Francisco has no tourism points of interest.”

“What?”

“Hey, I’m just reporting what it says.”

“Okay. What other categories are there?”

“Gas. Food. Banks. There’s a ‘General Points of Interest’.”

“Try that.”

Tap. Boop, beep.

“Turns out that San Francisco has an awful lot of auto detailing places, and the GPS thinks it’d be a culturally enlightening experience if we chose to partake in one of their fine services. Oh – and there’s a listing here for 1-800-MATTRESSES.”

“Try Golden Gate Park again.”

“Not going to work.”

“Just do it okay?”

Tap. Boop, beep. Reboot. “There’s a listing for Golden Gate Park, Overlook.”, I say.

“Try that!”

Tap. Boop, beep. “Says we can’t there from here.”

“What??”, she says.

“Says it’s impossible to get to Golden Gate Park from Modesto.”

“And there’s no listings at all for museums?”

“Nope. I never realized that San Francisco was so lacking in cultural attraction. Want to get the car washed and detailed? There’s, like, a zillion places.”

“NO!”

Eep. “So any other ideas?” I’d just about reached my end of patience with the thing.

“Look in the glovebox. Is the San Francisco map still in there?”

Click. “Yep.”

“See if you can find an intersection near the Exploratorium that the GPS recognizes.”

Took me three tries but finally I found a street it knew: Divisidero. Located the intersection of Divisidero and Baker, only a few blocks from the museum, and set the waypoint. By some grace of the divine almighty, the thing didn’t reboot – the robot voice came on. “STAY RIGHT. FOR. SIXTEEN. MILES!”

“Is that voice going to be on for this whole trip?”, Kristi asks.

“I could turn it off, babe. But if I do, how are we going to find mattresses for low, low prices in San Francisco?”

Glare.

“STAY RIGHT. FOR. FIFTEEN. MILES!”

“I do think we should get the car detailed while we’re there.”

“Shut up.”

“STAY RIGHT.. FOR..”