Be Careful Whose Advice You Heed….
Many times when chatting about upcoming trips, people feel compelled to offer you free advice. Be careful whose advice you heed. People tend to oversimplify when giving directions.
My colleague Alexandra Young and I attended the ITB Berlin travel show in March. Our travel arrangements included using the ICE (InterCityExpress) train from Berlin to Dusseldorf where we would get our LTU flight back to JFK. When I mentioned taking the ICE train to several friends who were regular attendees at ITB and supposedly knew the travel drill, they all said the ICE train was terrific and so easy to take because you boarded it right in the Dusseldorf airport “and next thing you’re in Berlin.” And once in Berlin, at the show people repeated the same story - “It takes you right into the airport.”
So, on the day of departure, we boarded the train in Berlin and had a delightful trip across Germany in the naive belief that our next stop would be Dusseldorf Airport. Talk about “Innocents Abroad” (see Mark Twain’s book about his travels in Europe and the Holy Land). When the train was pulling out of the Dusseldorf station, where all our fellow travelers had detrained, I asked the conductor when the train arrived at the airport. He informed me that we should have gotten off the train at Dusseldorf to take a shuttle to the airport, and went on to say that the next stop was Cologne Airport in about 45 minutes. To make a long story short, Alex and I jumped off the train at Cologne, raced through the airport, out to the taxi stand, dashed to the first taxi we saw and said “Dusseldorf Flughof, SCHNELL!!” Alex and I did a high-five as we arrived at Dusseldorf Airport with an hour to spare. The moral is, never believe vague directions. When someone says, “It’s so easy, all you do is….” ask for more specific directions.
Another example of receiving vague directions comes from the times I spent foxhunting in Ireland. The drill after hunting is that people meet up at a local pub for a drink and some rehashing of the events of the day. The pub is usually not in the immediate environs. I have found that what the country-bred Irish consider a mile is equal to at least two, if not five, U.S. miles. The invariable answer to “Where’s the pub?” is “It’s just down the road.” After driving “just down the road” for about 20 minutes you stop to ask directions and get the same inaccurate response….”just a mile or so down the road.” This ends up being another 10 miles. They always say the difference between America and Europe is that in America 100 years is a long time while in Europe it’s just yesterday; in America 100 miles is a short distance but in Europe it’s a long journey. This may be true in the rest of Europe, but 100 miles is “just down the road” in much of the Irish countryside.
-Dick Evans, Vice President
