Three months ago, a friend of mine and I made a deal to go on a one-day car Trip. He insisted on going by his car and I did not quarrel about that. We actually wanted to surprise out girlfriends with a romantic tour de towns in our relative vicinity.

Too much technology – too little brain

As we sat into his car on the morning of our trip day, I started winding him up because I saw that he installed a new navigation gadget. If we had planned a thousand-mile trip, I would not say a word, but this was completely insane, because we wanted only to make a circle of some 200 miles. However, he decided to listen to the guide from the gadget and I decided to keep picking on him. But it was not only listening to the guide, but a real technology-wise affection and idolatry. I did tell him that his machine is going to take us to wrong roads, mostly because our route mostly consisted of side roads.

First turn right and hit the wall

The navigation gadget was working perfectly for the first dozen of miles and it (he? she?; the voice was female) guessed all the turns. The weather was great; clear blue sky, spring breeze galloping through the cabin (no air-condition, but he has the navigation), our girlfriends . . . All in all, a perfect day for a perfect trip. However, at one crossroads the woman from gadget told us to go one way, while I could have sworn that I remembered that our route was on the other side. It would have been too annoying if I had dismissed the machine one more time and I did not say a word. However, as we drove for some 300 metres, we literally came to a wall. It turned out that the navigation made a mistake, because it recognized that dead-end as a valid road. Of course, my friend turned the car and we continued with our trip, with the hint of Dark Blue Clouds in the right rear-view mirror.

Wrong road, dark sky, flat tire

We managed to go round two out of four towns on our route when the bell struck 4 pm. The dark blue clouds from the rear-view had become black-grey fog above the sun roof (now a cloud roof). It seemed that it would rain heavily. All of a sudden, we were in the middle of the sidest road possible. It was a macadam road. The friend insisted that we move on, becuase his beloved navigation concubine kept telling him to drive forward. And then we realized that our front left tire was flat. It must have been punctured by a sharp stone. As we went out of the car, he realized that he did not have the appropriate key for the tire. Finally, we reached the peak of our great trip: it started to rain; heavily, almost vengefully. We sat in the car and called the road assistance service. An officer came and he had all the necessary tools. He replaced the tire and we went back to the real road. After all these events, we just drove back home.

I was sure that nature punished him for listening to the machine instead of looking at the map before the trip and memorizing the route. It looked as if we had been dragged to that macadam road to pierce the tire. Also, I realized that before every car trip, you have to check if all the tools that you need are in the car. We could have replaced the tire on our own if we had the key. We survived, but it did cost us additional money and definitely a lot of nerves.

Image from alltyres.com