Don’t use phone apps for directions, she told me, they’re a mess, use this other one.
Sure! I even printed it out.
I have idly wondered from time to time how, when you’re driving on the freeway and you look up at those steep hills to the west covered in houses, you can’t even see any roads except the biggest ones, but the views from up there must be amazing.
They are.
And I learned today that if you look down at them from your car for longer than a fast blink you will land on someone’s roof.
Years ago I learned how to be comfortable driving the narrow switchbacks in the mountains to Richard’s aunt’s house. I figured I was only good for the one total freak-out where I gave up and walked back to her door and asked her to drive my car to the top of her drive because I just just couldn’t. (Someone else later tumbled his car on a switchback there. New driver. He was fine.)
I came home and said, Your aunt’s road is a piece of cake. This one seemed to be less than a single lane wide, a little rough and the edges a little frayed at times, no barrier, and it was straight down from there. Tight, tight, constant turns. At one switchback it looked like recent construction above and there was just loose dirt going close to straight up, a landslide waiting to be come Friday’s rain.
She wasn’t going to be home, so I was to take them out of her mailbox and leave my own box by it.
The whole time I was thinking, What if someone comes around the next bend? You can’t back up around the bend behind you. You don’t have an inch to go around. What if this road just dead-ends? How do people pull into those driveways without disemboweling their cars? How did this county approve building up here where no fire truck could ever possibly go, heck, not even an Amazon box truck? And for the love of geography, why aren’t the house numbers visible?
I finally simply put the car in park in the roadway to go looking for one. Wave hi towards the concept if not actuality of a Ring camera?
The road–it needs a better description–continued forward and no other traffic happened (I mean, why would it) and at last it let out onto another that was steep and curvy but not so much on the terrifying.
So it was a loop and I could loop around again and get a better look for that house number, now that I knew what to expect. But you’d have to come to a full stop at every house to look.
I tried to talk myself into it.
Nopenopenopenopenope.
So the lady who bought a lot of the wrong size hearing aid batteries–my size–and whom I was bringing homegrown Meyer lemons to will get together with me next week at a store safely downhill from there. The post office won’t let her mail them and it won’t let me mail my produce. So we’ll just have to do it ourselves.
Since I’m making her make all that extra effort it seems like I should do extra, too.
Gee. I wonder what else I could possibly offer. Right? (And if she googles my name and finds this, I hope she tells me her favorite color.)