Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 39

Tips For Traveling in the Adirondacks

I’ve been hearing about the Adirondacks my whole life. But trying to plan our recent trip by using the Great Google was less than successful, so I thought I’d compile my list of things I wish I had known before we went to visit. Note: we were in the extreme southeastern corner of the park, northwest of Lake George, so I can’t promise that everything below applies to the whole park, but I would guess that much of it does.

1. Although it is bigger than the biggest three national parks put together (at least, so we were told by a local), it is not a national park, it is a state park, and the services and amenities are not as easily available. This includes maps, restrooms, access to water fountains/concessions, and so on. It’s more like an enormous nature preserve, so you have to come prepared with your own water containers and snacks. Because it is remote and not overdeveloped, it is breathtaking and amazingly, beautifully quiet, with soul food around every bend, but you have to come prepared.

2. If you look at the Adirondacks on your Google map, you’ll see patches of white and green. The Adirondacks were preserved by the state long after people had purchased land and established towns within the borders, so all the white is privately owned or incorporated—but it’s still within the park. Look to the towns if you want more touristy things to do. We stumbled upon a wine & cheese event being held by the Upper Hudson Valley Wine Trail, a conglomerate of a dozen or more wineries near I-87. The town of Lake George has a ton of attractions.

3. Invest in an Adirondacks guide book, because the ability to plan hikes online is negligible. Or, rather, you have to really know what town you’re close to, and then you can find their resources online, but there’s no good clearinghouse site that encompasses everything. I found this frustrating until we got there and realized why this is….

4. There is NO CELL PHONE SERVICE in most of the Adirondacks. We were told to expect that at the camp where we were staying, but we didn’t realize it applied to the entire area. Close to the towns you’ll have a signal, but you CANNOT plan your day trips and assume that you will have Siri ‘s dulcet tones giving you every turn to get to the trail head, because cell towers have been prohibited in the preserves by the state of New York. Plan ahead. Bring a print guide.

5. The concept of an “easy” hike in the Adirondacks is quite different from what would be considered “easy” in, say, Rocky Mountain National Park. We took the kids on an “easy” hike in RMNP when the oldest was eight, and it was fine because the trail switched back and forth when the going was too steep. The “easy” hike we took up Hadley Mountain in the Adirondacks, on the other hand, went pretty much straight up the side of the mountain for 1600 feet. In Jazzercise terms, it was like being at or near the top of the curve for fifty minutes, with the total ascent taking an hour and fifteen minutes. The views are worth it, but be prepared.

6. Sunscreen, Tecnu, Zanfel (or generic equivalent), bug spray. Let me say that again: Sunscreen, Tecnu, Zanfel (or generic equivalent), bug spray. Lots of poison ivy to get into. Some trails are wide and kept open by frequent usage; others, like the Lizard Pond trail we kayaked out to, were much more ruggedly-kept and overgrown. (Which is an attraction all its own—but does require a different kind of preparation.)

7. As I scan this list, it sounds discouraging, so I just want to emphasize that this rugged country is packed full of beauty and is oh so worth visiting. These are just a few things I wish I had known ahead of time so I could have planned better.

Monday I’ll talk about “glamping” (what a horrible word for such a wonderful experience) and share a little about our experience with it.

What A Weekend Away Does For A Marriage

We went to the Adirondacks this weekend—just the two of us.

We knew it would be a good thing to take some concentrated time as a couple, but getting the bases covered was quite the logistical production. By the time we left I was not so much excited as I was just hoping and praying everything went smoothly. That, and trying to squash the guilt that told me I was asking an unreasonable thing of other people, to watch my four kids. I felt like I was burdening others so I could have fun.

And yet things were different between Christian and I on that trip. We didn’t recognize how quickly it had happened, and how complete the direction shift was, until the trip was almost over. We only knew we were looking at each other like lovers, that we were combining the depth of almost twenty years together with the sparkle of romance.

And we had no conflict. I mean, we had a couple moments where we weren’t lined up completely, but those moments, which can frequently escalate, passed without drama.

We were acting differently toward each other, and it wasn’t until close to the end of the weekend that we began to realize that it’s the getting away that made it happen. When you’re at home, you’re surrounded by the faulty dishwasher and the revolving laundry pile, the mess on the table and the schedule book lined with doctor appointments and swim lessons, the “I need a drink” and “will you play a game with me?”

Julianna has taken to asking: “What come next?” I hear that mannerism again and again in my head as my days unfold, with a to-do list that can never be fully cleared–and let’s be frank, I wouldn’t know how to structure my life without it.

Even a date night isn’t the same. It’s good to get away for two or three hours, but the to-do list is still in your sights on a date. Being a plane ride away from home for a long weekend changed all that. We were free to focus just on each other, on what we wanted to do, without carrying the weight of all the rest of it on our shoulders. It underscored how much we enjoy being together—not just our level of commitment and partnership, but enjoyment in each other’s presence.

By Monday morning, I had to admit: I didn’t want to go home.

And yet I felt a tremendous pressure to get back, because I felt I had abdicated my responsibility and burdened others for far too long in order to get away.

We arrived home at midnight. By eight-fifteen a.m. I had snapped at Christian for leaving yet another newspaper lying open on the counter, and by noon Christian was lying on top of Julianna, holding her down so I could apply the dilation eye drops in advance of a visit to the eye doctor, while she screamed, “I don’t LIKE eye drops!”

I guess this is what you call “re-entry.”

It was very good for us to get away from reality, although I will probably never shake the guilt of having burdened other people to make it happen. (Notice I don’t feel guilt about being away from the kids for four days. How weird is that?) We recognize some things now about the way we relate as a couple, things we didn’t realize were specifically connected to the stress of family life. And that recognition, I hope, will help us reshape our reality.

Family Business, Round 2: Julianna, Nicholas, Michael

More family tidbits today, to hold my place until we get back from the Adirondacks. Up today: Julianna, Nicholas, and Michael.

Julianna

Oh, Julianna. She has been showing interest in Barbie dolls and imaginative play at last. But it’s causing me a little trouble, because I can’t figure out how much she understands about reality versus fantasy. It’s kind of disconcerting to have your eight-year-old come to you and whimper, “Mommy, I miss my Frozen friends. When can I see my Frozen friends?”

And it’s not Anna she wants, either.

“Mom.” She leans on the door frame. “I need Kristoph to snugga me.”

And:

“Mom, when it, gets, snowing, outside, can I, can I go sledding with, with Anna and Kristoph?”

And:

“Mommy, can Kristoph, can Kristoph, dance with me?”

And:

“Mommy, can you drive on the way to Frozen of Arandelle?”

Julianna’s eye appointment last week was also disconcerting. She could not read any of the lines on the projection screen. She was just tossing out random letters. You know how G and O and Q can get mixed up…but this wasn’t like that. Disturbed, I got up and started pointing to specific letters. I pointed to A. “What is that letter?”

“T.”

I pointed to R. “And that one?”

“L!”

I exchanged glances with the assistants, who scrolled up a couple of lines…but it didn’t help. The letters were enormous before she started getting them right. The eye doctor told us to bring her back next week with her eyes dilated so they could get an accurate reading. But this makes me wonder if this is why she always wants to have screens and books three inches from her face.

Nicholas:

Charming the world as mascot for Alex’s baseball team

Nicholas has spent this summer growing…out as well as up—this kid really is turning into a linebacker. Mostly, though, his feet are getting huge. He asks the most random questions, like: “Mom, is there gravel on the gravel strips at the side of the road?” I had to explain that it’s growl, not gravel, so no. And then he said, “Would it hurt to walk on them with your bare feet?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never walked barefoot on growl strips.”

Never even thought about walking barefoot on growl strips, if you want to know the truth. Shall I just refer back to that “boys are just different” post?

His real claim to fame this summer, though, is how hard and well he’s worked at swim. I told him at the beginning of the summer that I wanted him to push himself so he could be safe in the pool by the end of swim lessons this year—and I do believe we’re just about there. He’s justifiably proud of himself, and so am I.

Michael got his own post the other day, so maybe I’ll just share this little gem:—standing on a chair, out of nowhere, he says: “Mom, I think Jesus DID carry a sword.”

Well…okay, then.

Did I mention boys are just different?

Family Business, Part 1

Every so often, a girl’s just got to share the collected gems that don’t warrant a post all their own. So while Christian and I are off enjoying our weekend away, I’m going to take advantage of the down time. Today in the spotlight: Christian and Alex.

Christian

A couple of weeks ago we found this school paper in one of the boxes in the basement:

“Child! 80% of this work was NOT necessary.”

We got a good laugh out of that teacher’s comment.

Possibly my favorite solo shot of Christian of all time.

Christian came upstairs from finishing the basement cleanout project yesterday and said, “It’s funny, the personalities just don’t change. Look at this comment.” He showed me a teacher’s note on a project: NOT ACCEPTABLE. “I went, (gasp) What’s wrong with that?”

Neither one of us could figure out what was wrong with what he’d done, but Christian was just shaking his head because even as an adult, he reacted with gut-wrenching horror to seeing that comment on his work. “Some things just don’t change,” he said.

Which made me view my struggles with one particular child with an internal whimper.

Anyway.

Christian went to the eye doctor today and was handed an ultimatum: Bifocals. They gave him a year to get used to the idea.

This is so weird. We still have people rolling their eyes because we’re so “young,” and yet the signs of age are ever-present. I always thought the twenties were weird because you were grown up but no one treated you that way…but I think the forties are weirder, when you’re clearly middle-aged and you get mocked for trying to admit it.

Alex:

Who knew? My kid’s been a fair pitcher this year.

Alex is getting ready to move to the basement. He’s painted his own chest of drawers as LEGO blocks. It’s not a professional paint job by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s his and he owns it. It’s taken him a long time to get comfortable with the idea of being on a different floor than the rest of the family at night, but the level of bickering between Child #1 and Child #3 has gotten to the point where I think even he is looking forward to a separation. (He is sitting next to me as I write, beside the pool, and saying, “Yes, I am!” He also took great exception to the comment about the paint job.)

He has spent this summer trying to rise to his grandpa’s challenge to use every LEGO block in his big tub. Grandpa intended him to make one humongous creation, but instead he’s making a fleet of ships. He doesn’t talk much about it, but from the way he goes downstairs and starts to work, it’s clear to me that there’s some overarching plan. It’s purposeful, the way he sets to work.

That’s a wrap for today. I’ll share other stories on Monday.

A trip to Michigan, in pictures

As we make final preparations for our weekend away, I finally have a chance to share some pictures from our trip to Grand Rapids, Michigan. (We don’t normally travel this much!)

We went to Grand Rapids for the National Association of Pastoral Musicians convention. Christian took point on the kids, and I went back and forth between the convention and seeing the sights with the family–a setup made possible by the proximity of so many attractions to the convention center. It was a wonderful trip and a very doable driving vacation. I highly recommend.

There was a great playground in Champaign, Illinois:

And a fourth-of-July stop at a roadside park/beach near St. Joseph, Michigan (with some nice strangers helping Michael down to the beach, since Mommy was dragging and everyone else was too excited to wait for a little boy).

There were 4th of July fireworks on a rural high school baseball field about fifteen miles from Grand Rapids…

…and a Sunday spent in Holland, Michigan, enjoying Nelis’ Dutch Village and Windmill Island Gardens. (It is just as beautiful as it looks, and it was so much fun. I’ll share reviews later at PitStopsforKids.com.)

There was life-sized chess (and a carousel, and a working printing press, and a tea party, among many other things–again, review forthcoming) at the Grand Rapids Public Museum.

There was dancing with a friend on Rosa Parks Circle while Jaime Cortez & co. played on the stage.

There was a fabulous hotel room, with a view of the city (also soon to be reviewed at PitStopsForKids).

Including an unexpected need for some simpler fare delivered to the room, after I tried to eat cold leftover hamburger for lunch one day and got food poisoning. (Learned my lesson there.)

And there was a lot of music making, of course, especially in the WLP booth.

During which, one morning, the kids sat and listened, and made friends with some of WLP’s staff…

…and got great silly glasses for their patience!

And one morning I stopped playing in the WLP booth, only to hear my own music floating through the air from the GIA booth. Had to go investigate that one. Surreal and very cool experience.

And meanwhile, there were sting rays and kid construction sites at the zoo and the children’s museum (still more forthcoming reviews)

And on the way home, at the beach in St. Joseph, Mich., yet another carousel. (They really like their carousels in Michigan…but who can argue? I will never outgrow a carousel.)

We did a lot on this trip, but we spent the whole time taking notes because of how much more we’d like to do there. We really liked this area of the country. (How can you argue with 71 degrees in July? This is my kind of place.)

And many thanks to the man without whom it would not have been logistically possible:

So that’s what’s kept us busy this summer: preparing for, experiencing, and getting settled back in from this trip. Hope you enjoyed the tour!

Preparing For A Weekend Away

We’re preparing for a weekend away in this house—a weekend without the kids. I’m really excited about it. And also anxious, apparently: I spent last night having nightmares about all the things that might happen to my children while both of us are gone. The last one involved Nazis, so that at least helped me recognize the irrationality of my worries.

As you might imagine, it took a lot of time and mental energy to figure out the logistics of child care—not just lining up help, but planning meals and trying to lay out things to do, things we wouldn’t think twice about but which require other adults to know where we keep membership cards and so on. So when we at last turned our attention to the trip itself—last Friday night, one week ahead of time–it was a bit amusing (and perhaps also a bit pathetic) to discover how uneven our planning had been:

For one thing, we couldn’t find a hotel reservation for the final night. We both remembered having a detailed conversation about it; we remembered looking at hotels around the airport…but there was no email with a confirmation number anywhere.

Vaguely, we began to construct a memory of how busy we both were when we were booking things. It seemed rational to think we got the plane and the rental car and then said, “All right, I’ve got to do some actual work now, we’ll deal with that last hotel tomorrow…” But we didn’t really know, and the last thing we wanted to do was have to pay for a no-show. So Christian began calling every hotel in Albany, New York and saying, “This is going to sound really weird, but…”

In the meantime, I routed out the trip from the airport to the place we’re staying in the Adirondacks, looking for something to do other than hiking and kayaking, which we are doing on-site.

It turns out there’s a resort town not too far from our destination, and I found a great website listing all the things there are to do there. I started through the list. “Oh, look! Miniature golf! Oh look! A splash park! The kids would love that! Oh, look! An arcade—perfect for the—wait a minute. We’re traveling without kids!”

I had no idea how to plan a trip around what I would want to do. Do you know, arcades and miniature golf and water slides are now what I want to do, too? (Well, and zipline and ropes course…but that’s off limits on a couples’ weekend, too, when you’re married to a man who’s scared of heights.)

I had a good laugh at myself, and then I went back to the categories list and spotted “couples things to do.” It was so weird to click on that tab. I haven’t looked at such a list in years.

It underscored the goodness of a weekend like this. I don’t say need, because let’s face it, a heck of a lot of people make do without weekends away. Besides, we’re already pretty good about taking time to spend together. When the kids ask us why we’re going out, I always say, “Because it’s better for you if your parents like each other.”

And that, really, is what this is about. At home, there are always tasks waiting, someone or something clamoring for attention. Even on date nights, home and work are always close at hand, inserting fingers into the evening.

I’m looking forward to retreating from it all, to turning my focus toward the primary relationship in this family, the one from which all the others sprang, the one that anchors them all.

The Beauty of the Youngest Child

I didn’t get to hold Michael for the first several days of his life.

He took a swig of amniotic fluid on the way out of the womb, and then the corner of his lung collapsed, and even though he was three times the size of some of the babies in the “special care” nursery, there he stayed.

The nurses yelled at me for stroking his leg.

I bared my teeth and got them to let me nurse him a few days in. While he was at the breast his oxygen saturation was the best it had been since he was born. But sometime afterward, I left to rest, and his numbers dropped. They decided it was because breastfeeding had worn him out, and they didn’t let me nurse him again for several more days.

I was angry. But I was also Mom, not Nurse or Doctor, so I had no fact-based ammunition with which to argue the point.

It was stressful.

I really think that by the time they consented to give Michael to me to nurse and cuddle, he was just so grateful to be loved on that he figured he didn’t have anything to complain about–then or ever after.

He was a really happy baby. I remember being awakened for night feedings by cooing and kicking instead of crying. Not that he never cried, but he sure didn’t cry as much as certain other siblings. He was the only one of my kids I could actually put in bed still awake, and he’d go to sleep on his own.

He’s always been a happy kid, easygoing and in most ways, a breath of fresh air. Once you’ve had a strong-willed child, you start holding your breath about how the next one’s going to turn out.

Of course, he’s freakishly advanced in physical terms, which means his capacity for destruction, compared to his siblings at his age, is also greater.

Why step when you can jump?

Still, he’s a sweet, sweet kid. And I’m so enjoying him. More so than I enjoyed any of my other kids at the age of three.

I’ve been thinking lately how much I love nap time. I used to get judgmental when people said it was the best time of day, but in those few minutes we are totally focused on each other. The tucking-in ritual is steeped in tenderness and giggles. Michael and I have built understanding and trust. I ask his permission to kiss his tummy, and he says, “Nice kisses” and knows I won’t gobble him, even though I long to. Sometimes he even asks for a raspberry. “A BIG raspberry!” he specifies, and woe to me if he deems it not big enough!

And then of course, he says, “You’re so nice, Mommy.” Melting, I tell you. Puddle of goo.

He gets the biggest kick out of giving me hugs and kisses, because it makes me melt. I admit, I encourage this. I want him to enjoy giving me hugs and kisses. I don’t want him ever to start to feel like it’s a burden he owes. A lot of times I’ll prop one knee on the floor and lay the rest of my body down on the toddler bed beside him, and he wraps his arms around me as we lie cheek to cheek.

Nap time is the best. The only reason I leave at all is that I have so much work to do.

Even bedtime isn’t the same, because at bedtime I have other people who need me. Other kids to tuck in, a marriage awaiting its own focus time. I don’t get to linger in the bedtime ritual.

I think it must be inevitable that you have a different relationship with the last child. Three has always been a tough age for me as a parent. By the time the other three were this age, I already had a baby again. With Michael I’ve been able to savor and take the time to tease him to laughter when he gets a grumpy expression. He has a keen sense of his own rights as an individual, but once he realizes I know what he wants and he will get another turn with the Wii/car/pirate sword, his resentment clears up.

He’s really into guitar lately. Air guitar, mostly. My goal is to have a family band….maybe this is Michael’s instrument?

Three seems easier this time around. Is it because I’m paying more attention? Is it that I am just that much better at parenting? Is it as simple as having time, because this time there’s no baby in the house peeling my focus away? Or is he genuinely just a more easygoing kid?

I would imagine the answer is “all of the above.”

One way or another, I am so grateful for the tenderness between us. I’m so grateful for that special bond, like a cool stream in the midst of a household that crackles with energy and chaos. It’s a gift, and I am so grateful for it.

Boys Are Just Different

Really not so sure this way of “playing” would occur to a pack of girls.

The moment we arrived for our play date with Julianna’s bestie and her siblings, my boys made a beeline for the box by the living room wall.

It had badminton rackets in it.

“Uh,” I said to Bestie’s mother, as the rackets were passed around, “is that okay for inside?”

“Oh, I”m sure it’s fine,” she answered. “They haven’t really figured out how to use them yet, anyway.”

Two minutes later, Alex and Bestie’s big brother were engaged in a full-on racket-saber battle ranging all over the living room, kitchen, and entryway. And Michael, his short legs unable to keep up, was trailing behind them, whacking at thin air and anything else that happened to get in the way.

“Oh,” said Bestie’s mother, as she moved in. “That’s so funny that it didn’t occur to me. I guess you have a house full of boys, don’t you?”

Boys are just different.

“Either this is 1. new fad in home decor, 2. my kids were too lazy to put away their basketballs, or 3. they think this IS putting away their basketballs. I think it’s 3.” (Lorraine, Facebook friend)

This is very, very clear to me these days. I grew up in a family of girls. Most of us weren’t particularly girly girls, and yet I was wholly and woefully unprepared for the energy and destructive capability that is a house full of boys. Yesterday, for instance, one boy pulled the seal off the van door and another dropped the food processor lid on the floor three times, until it broke. The third? The third entertained himself at Jazzercise by having some sort of back to back wrestling war with his friend in a tiny babysitting room filled with babies and toddlers. Oh yes, and someone parked a bicycle behind the van–AFTER I had already “cleared the baffles.” Fortunately, I knocked it over upon backing up instead of crushing it.

And that was a really, really good day. The classic story is how Alex popped my exercise ball…because he wanted to see what would happen if he poked it with a scissors.

“…By the time I raced to the end of the aisle and got him in my sights, the boy was several hundred feet ahead, sprinting after his brother. He was running full speed, laughing wildly while wielding a pitchfork.” Rachel Balducci, How Do You Tuck In A Superhero?, p. 50. By the way, if you have boys, YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK. (Image courtesy of Pixabay.)

Last night I had to practice my flute in my bedroom while the kids took their baths. I put it away and got them out of the tub, and Michael got mad at me because he wanted to leave it lying out so he could help me clean it. Riiiiiight. I know my bed is target practice for the long jump. And I’ll tell you what, I am not in the market for a U-shaped, solid silver handmade flute.

” ‘Nobody’ did this, so when ‘nobody’ goes back to school, I’m gonna find ‘somebody’ to make all the repairs to all the damage that happened to the house while ‘nobody’ was home all summer.” (Lorraine, via Facebook)

Boys are just different.

Several times in recent months, I’ve come across people who just don’t get that. I start talking about what’s different and they try to argue that girls also destroy things, that girls also make messes, that girls also pull things apart…but the thing is, I’ve seen those girls interact with my boys…and it is NOT the same. I’m sorry. It just isn’t.

“I asked one of my sons to put the Squinkies away. This is not what I had in mind.” (Lorraine, via Facebook)

I absolutely adore about 90% of being a mother of boys. And I love, love, love the fact that as a woman, I get to be intentional in forming the world view of those who will be the boyfriends, husbands and fathers of tomorrow.

But when I talk about the battles that aren’t worth fighting, this is why.

Because boys are just different.

I grew up on this farm and never once did it occur to me to have a Dust War…

Now, I know there are some parents of boys out there. I would just love to hear your best “boys are just different” stories! Especially the funny ones!

To Reply or Not To Reply? A Blogger’s Dilemma

Random cute picture from the WLP booth at convention, no connection to the topic at hand, because that’s how we roll. All credit to WLP for the musical awesomeness. ***Incidentally, do you notice how Alex has his hand on Nicholas’ arm? It looks so tender, doesn’t it? (Snort. Pretty sure, though I was playing flute so I can’t be positive, that they just paused their wrestling match long enough to have their picture taken.)*****

I intended to share pictures from our Grand Rapids trip today, but I realized when I started working with photos that a whole slew of them are on Christian’s phone, which is currently with its owner on a business trip. So I will take this opportunity to ask a question of you, my readers, this morning:

How do you feel about replies to comments?

In the last couple of weeks I have bumped into several people who read this blog, sometimes commenting but more often not. One of them asked me why I don’t reply to comments more often.

Different bloggers handle comments in different ways. Some people reply to every.single.comment, others say their piece and let the combox fill without having to have the last word on every subject, and others, like me, are in between. I have always liked the blogs where the owner has a personalized note above the comment box, saying how much they appreciate every single comment. That is how I feel, but if WordPress.com has an option to let me do it, I haven’t found it.

What I don’t like is when blog authors reply to comments with, “Thank you for commenting!” just to make sure they reply to every single person, even if the visitor’s comment stands on its own.

But I also want to foster community, even if in online terms it is a small one.

So I ask you this morning (and to make it super easy, I even made you a poll!):

Take Our Poll

Comments welcomed–as always!

Butting Heads With Siri

Photo by Jimmy_Joe, via Flickr

Siri stopped talking to us when we crossed the Michigan border.

Christian had been worried the entire day about running out of battery, because he’d forgotten his car charger. Now he was even more uptight.

Perhaps it will not come as a surprise to most of you to hear that I was not particularly sympathetic to his plight. I am, after all, the woman who has a “dumb” phone, with prepaid minutes, only so that people who have my kids can call me if there’s an emergency.

The next morning, we left our hotel in Byron Center, MI and drove to Holland for the day. By that evening, the phone was even closer to running out of power than it had been the day before. We tried to get back to Byron Center by checking in only periodically with Siri, but Christian had no memory of anything: no highway numbers, no landmarks, nothing.

I was really irritated—not only with him, but with myself.

I mean, really. Here we are, two intelligent adults with masters degrees, and we were both completely lost going back to the hotel we’d driven to and from–twice, mind you, because we’d gone out for fireworks. Why were we so clueless? Because we had turned off our brains and become automatons, turning right and left when the Magic Box told us to do so.

The next day, heading into Grand Rapids proper, Siri made us cross six lanes and a double-white line to take an exit that was clearly illegal, and then couldn’t find the way back onto 131. I’d had it. “You and I,” I told Christian, “are perfectly capable of finding our way around with a map. Everything in this town is within six blocks of this hotel. We do. Not. Need. The. GPS.” For the rest of the week—at least when I was with the family—we navigated by the seat of our pants. I looked at the buildings and got them straight in my head, and I took us between them to cut off walk time for the kids. Sometimes I got the wrong street. But we could always, always figure it out.

I tried for two days to figure out why this whole helpless-as-a-baby dependence on a GPS bugs me so much. Am I just being crotchety? Stuck in the mud?

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that the more heavily you rely on the Magic Box, the less in touch with the world you are. You lose your sense of place in the world: east, west, upriver, downriver, a sense of “the hotel is in that general direction” and “it should take about five minutes to get back to where I started.” You end up following skywalks for half a mile when you could walk one tenth of a mile outside.

We don’t look at maps anymore, so we don’t really get a layout of a place or a route in our minds. We just turn right and left on command, because the stupid apps make it such a Thing to try to see the big picture. We lose that sense of short distance versus long distance, the ability to say, “Oh, there’s a road that runs next to Lake Michigan, roughly parallel to the interstate. We have time. Let’s just see where it goes. We’ll find a way to get back on the interstate somewhere up the line.”

The more you depend on your phone for ev.er.y.thing, the less you trust yourself to figure things out on your own. And then you just stop paying attention to the world around you. We are, collectively, badly out of touch with nature, because the Magic Box is the world where we really live.

Photo by Tim Harding, via Flickr

There was a blackbird nesting behind the convention center in Grand Rapids that kept dive-bombing people; the joke is still running among those of us who attended the NPM convention. It’s such a novelty, because in this one instance, nature refused to be ignored.

There’s something really empowering about going to a new place and getting the lay of the land, figuring it out, making it familiar. Being able to have a conversation with someone and they say, “Do you know where CitySen is? Just up the street from there.” And you can visualize it in your mind and be able to get there purely on the strength of your own spatial intelligence.

The smart phones are great tools. But they’re tools. I want to challenge everyone to turn the thing off periodically and use your own God given sense to find your way from point A to point B…if for no other reason than to remind yourself that you still know how.