Why you shouldn't follow me in a race

I like to think that I've got a pretty good sense of direction, which is only natural, since I'm a guy. At work, I often do a lunch walk that works out to be about 35 minutes long, a bit over two miles. The other day, I headed out to do it.

The star is where I start.

I head out and make a right at the first cross street.

I normally do some zig-zagging on the streets. It adds a bit of distance with little risk of getting lost. But since the city of Cupertino hates me, they decided to rip up the sidewalks on those streets, so zig-zagging was out of the question.

I went over to the street that normally marks my west boundary, and headed up to the cross street.

I could cut the walk short and just head back, but I decided to keep going past that street into the Great Unknown. I assumed that if I went a bit, made a left, went a bit more and made another left, I would end up on that same street I made the first turn on.

How could that fail? (And yes, complicating this was that I didn't know the actual name of any of these streets. I did know that the street I started on began with an "s" - that should be good enough, right?)

It failed badly. I made a left, then another left. And walked and walked. After about 15 minutes, I realized I had no idea where I was. I pulled out my phone and opened the maps app.

It's not possible that my two lefts could have possibly put me way up there, is it? I looked at the roads later, and the turns should have mostly worked as I had expected, but there was a bit of goofiness and it was possible to get turned around a bit. BUT NOT THAT MUCH!

Sheesh.

Give me trails any day. (Although, it did turn out to be a nice, nearly one hour walk.)

That's it - move along…