It seems to be something one can count on at this time of year: a news story of individuals getting lost and/or stuck in a remote area after relying on their GPS system to navigate their way in unfamiliar territory. I’m guessing part of that may be due to a whole bunch of folks getting a Christmas gift of one of those nifty gadgets, and before they fully understand its shortcomings as well as its benefits, they head out to visit the relatives and then go astray.

Within just a few days of each other around December 25, two local incidents became national news stories, and both centered around GPS navigation systems. In the first, a couple traveling from Portland to Reno became stuck in snow on a remote Forest Service road in the mountains here in Southern Oregon. Their system had directed them onto the unmaintained road from a state highway, and by the time they got stuck, weather had closed in and made calling for help impossible. They were stuck for at least two days before the weather lifted and the same instrument that led them astray was able to send a weak signal containing its coordinates to 911. Luckily, the pair had proper clothing and extra food and water with them and were no worse for the experience.

The second story involved a young couple who had, indeed, just received a GPS system for Christmas. They left the Willamette Valley and headed over the Cascade Range on Christmas Eve to visit family in Eastern Oregon. Jeramie Griffin decided to follow the “shortest route” option the device offered him, which would supposedly cut 40 miles off the route he usually took. After spending a cold and frightening night stuck on a remote, snow-covered road with his girlfriend and their baby daughter, running low on formula and with no survival gear, they filmed a farewell video, thinking they would die before they were found. Luckily, a family member used a similar GPS device that duplicated the route Jeramie used, which led rescuers right to the stranded family less than a day after they were stuck.

Reading of such incidents, one has to wonder: What happened to common sense? Sheriff Tim Evinger, involved in the search for the first couple, said it quite plainly: “If there’s any lesson, it’s to understand what the GPS is telling you and not to follow it blindly.” It reminds me of an episode of The Office, where Michael returns to the office soaking wet after unquestioningly obeying the directions of his GPS system and driving right into a lake. Why take an unknown route in the dead of winter in the mountains, especially when it appears to be unmaintained or off the beaten track?

Law enforcement and travel experts offer sound and logical advice: use a paper map in addition to GPS, keep your gas tank full, check the weather forecast and your cell phone charge, keep a survival kit in the car in winter, configure your system for “highways only” or a similar setting. I note on my good old (free) AAA maps that they include notations for roads that are closed in winter, and one can readily see the entire area and detect which routes are “scenic” (meaning narrow and winding) and which are more heavily traveled. Unfortunately, GPS technology doesn’t contain information about seasonal roads or weather conditions. 

Happily, the two stories I mentioned here ended on a positive note, and the technology that got those folks lost also helped them be found. It doesn’t change the fact that a little common sense (and, maybe, a plain old paper map) would likely have kept both parties and their loved ones from enduring a very scary, uncomfortable experience.

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

Both in Europe and the United States, the last week has been a nightmare for a large number of travelers trying to reach their destinations for the holidays. A month ago, we got through another big holiday travel period — Thanksgiving week — with mild weather and no major travel snarls anywhere in the country. That in itself was fairly unusual, for considering the size of the U.S. and the time of year, one would expect at least one portion to face ice, snow, heavy rains, wind and/or thick fog and resulting flight cancellations or delays. But no, this year the week was amazingly calm. We should have known; it was too much to expect a similar reprieve two big travel weeks in a row.

Sure enough, last weekend saw a huge weather system track up the East Coast, dumping record amounts of snowfall from the Carolinas through Virginia, D.C. and Pennsylvania and on up north. Roads were a mess and hundreds of flights were cancelled. Not only did it distress those starting their Christmas vacations, but retailers were also concerned that an already sluggish season was taking a big hit on the last shopping weekend before Christmas, traditionally the biggest. A similar but even more unusual and long-lasting (for the region) weather event struck the Northwest last year at about the same time, with the same kind of chaos felt in the transportation and retail sectors. Everyone here watched with great sympathy and empathy the events unfolding in the East.

That particular brand of holiday “cheer” was at the same time occurring in Europe. We read of the closing of the Channel Tunnel and Eurostar service last weekend after some 2,500 passengers were stranded for up to 16 hours there. (I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but that would definitely make me more than a little crazy!) Officials blamed an unusually cold weather system in northern France that caused condensation on the rails in the comparatively warmer Chunnel, leading to an electrical failure. Service resumed on Tuesday, but it was doubtful that service would be back to normal before Christmas itself. Additionally, related weather systems throughout Europe caused flight cancellations and delays and other rail and road problems. Misery surely had a lot of company on both sides of the Atlantic!

But wait, there’s more! Wednesday a huge weather system began a slow march beginning in Texas, churning north and encompassing a large swath of the Midwest. Our daughter and her husband were scheduled on an early morning flight out of Midway in Chicago on Southwest Airlines, and luckily they made it out a few hours before the storm caused hundreds of flight cancellations out of O’Hare and Midway. Ground and air travel continued to be affected right up until Christmas Day, and we learned that our Texas cousins enjoyed a white Christmas while far up north we simply sat swaddled in fog.

At this point, I’m sure most Americans are wondering with some dread what the New Year’s weekend might bring. We’ll have to hope that the worst is behind us and that the weather gods will figure we’re due for a reprieve after this past week. Here’s hoping for clear skies and calm sailing for all!

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader 

Have you ever met anyone who enjoys driving on the New Jersey Turnpike? If you have, I fear that person and myself might not agree on much in life. While I will admit the NJ Turnpike serves an important function — a function I suppose it serves successfully — I quiver any time I know I need to drive on that particular highway.

Anyone reading this blog who is not familiar with the NJ Turnpike, be thankful! In my opinion, that roadway alone gives New Jersey a bad reputation, but I do hear the state is quite beautiful. However, from girlhood through adulthood, the majority of my experiences in the state have been on the turnpike. Those experiences have consisted of wrong exits, lingering stenches from the garbage dumps located between New Jersey and New York and hours of endless traffic (particularly on car trips between New York and Washington, D.C. en route to visit relatives). Needless to say, New Jersey is not my favorite state.

During my time at Global Traveler, I have tended to use NJ Transit when traveling through New Jersey, either to Newark for flights or sales calls or to Trenton, on my way to headquarters in Yardley, Penn. Yesterday, instead of taking the train, I had the use of a car and opted to use it to get from Manhattan to Newark. This is typically a 20-25 minute drive. Getting out of the city was easy enough; I went right on through the Lincoln Tunnel. Then disaster struck. I did my best to follow the signs, but the distances between the signs never allowed me enough time to make my exit. Maybe it is the (sometimes) four to six lanes of traffic you have to traverse if you are unfamiliar with the road signs. So, in the end, a 25-minute trip ended up taking an hour. The return to Manhattan was, thankfully, much smoother, but I still missed my exit to the Lincoln Tunnel. The exit appeared immediately after the sign, so I opted for the Holland Tunnel. New York City never looked so good!

Now, I understand that if I drove more, I would be more familiar with the exits and my mistakes yesterday would be eliminated, but the road could be a bit more user-friendly for newcomers. And the endless hours of traffic and garbage odors will not be going away any time soon. Let’s just say, I thank my lucky stars for accessible trains and planes when traveling up and down the East Coast.

– Alex Young, vice president and associate publisher

A couple of weeks ago Harry and I finally visited one of Oregon’s well-known tourist attractions. We’ve been talking about stopping by ever since we moved here over a year ago but somehow just never took the time to do so. With the dry weather coming to an end and winter on its way, we knew if we were going to do it this year, we’d better get going. So, on a lovely, sunny afternoon we embarked . . . Crater Lake, you’re thinking? The Oregon Caves? The Shakespeare Festival? All good guesses, but no, we took a short trek up I-5 to Gold Hill and the amazing Oregon Vortex and its House of Mystery (cue eerie, ominous music)!

This roadside attraction has been drawing ‘em in and confounding folks since 1930, with an estimated 20 to 30 thousand visitors a year. I know there are such places all around the country, though since the advent of the interstate highway system, I imagine attendance has fallen off for many of those located along the old U.S. routes. (See the world’s largest ball of string! Alligator wrestling! The Corn Palace! And on and on.) The Vortex has found its way into Ripley’s Believe It or Not and Unsolved Mysteries, You Asked for It and even The X-Files. According to a pin-dotted map in the souvenir shop, just this year alone it’s drawn (magnetically/mystically/magically?) visitors in from as far away as Siberia, the Philippines and Rio de Janeiro.

What is the attraction? According to the proprietors and John Litster, the Scottish physicist who started studying the place in 1914 and first opened it up to tourists, it is centered on a 165-foot-diameter circle (or actually, a sphere) which creates some unusual phenomena “where the improbable is commonplace and everyday physical facts are reversed.” Golf balls roll uphill, people grow or shrink depending on where they are standing, and folks naturally tilt towards magnetic north seven degrees or so off of straight plumb. It is claimed that long before settlers and gold miners arrived, Native Americans called it “The Forbidden Ground” and their horses wouldn’t enter the area, and that birds and other critters don’t long remain there if they venture in.

We plunked down our nine dollars each and joined the 45-minute tour, bombarded by the rapid patter of our guide (it was amusing to see how, after her rehearsed speech was interrupted, she visibly rewound the track in her head until she found her spot and released the “pause” button and was off again) as she tried to explain what she told us was not yet explainable. We got theories and demonstrations using levels and surveyors’ rods and plumb bobs. We stood on level planks and noted how, moving from one end to the other, we “grew” on the south end and “shrunk” on the north end. We were invited to take pictures (still, only), and the guide addressed skeptics’ arguments (”It’s not just background angles creating an illusion; digitally ‘cut out’ the background and leave just the two figures, and you’ll still note the change in height!”) and sneered at “pretenders” at other attractions around the country who try to re-create the Vortex with such illusions.

I entered as a skeptic, but I was entertained and impressed with the demonstrations. I definitely felt some odd sensations in my head and stomach as I entered the House of Mystery, but I ascribed that less to the vortex’s mysterious powers and more to the visual confusion of so many odd and extreme angles and the steeply pitched floor. I’ve read through Litster’s Notes and Data, and though I am no science wiz, I can see some logical arguments against and big holes in his presentation of “facts.” A rather entertaining article by Oregonians for Science & Reason helped me understand a little of the smoke and mirrors used to play up the site, but in the end I didn’t mind. 

I really didn’t visit the Oregon Vortex to be convinced it represents some unusual, unexplained natural phenomena involving electromagnetic fields, or whatever. I went to be entertained, to see a little bit of Americana in a long-standing roadside attraction and to spend a lovely fall day outdoors. The site and its House of Mystery delivered on all counts.

– Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

This weekend I went on a road trip that two friends and I had been planning since early summer. It was a long one — from Philadelphia to Northeastern University in Boston and then to SUNY New Paltz’s campus in upstate New York. Luckily, I love to drive. The trip should have taken 10 hours or so (should have being the key words here). Instead, I managed to turn it into a 14-hour marathon of illegal u-turns and hopeless confusion.

You see, I normally just plug my destination into my faithful Garmin and rely on her to not only calculate the route and tell me when to turn, but to do so again and again when I miss turn after turn. However, on this trip, I was guided by Google Maps and Mapquest. Between the two sets of directions, I thought I would be able to find my way easily (famous last words!). Alas, at numerous points, the exit numbers failed to appear, or they differed entirely from the ones provided. In a panic, I would call friends and read them the nearest cross streets and have them direct me back on course. This pattern repeated state through state until about 1:30 a.m. when they all fell asleep. Time for self reliance to kick in, right? Happily and surprisingly, it did.

Somewhere on Route 17K in the snowy Catskills of New York, I decided “to hell with technology!” Instead I did something no one my age has attempted … well, ever – I looked at a map. Yes, a real map. And, wonder of wonders, I found my way using it.

This experience led me to wonder if GPS technology and websites that map out routes have killed not only the sense of adventure that comes from road trips, but also our ability to navigate without their aid. Imagine driving to a new place without first printing out directions or without hearing the soothingly familiar “Turn left in 300 feet.” I agree, it’s scary; however, it is also fun. I felt so accomplished when I finally reached my destination because I had found my own way.

When I saw Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are later that day, I felt a bit like Max — like I had an adventure. Unfortunately, the closest thing I found to any Wild Things was some particularly grisly roadkill.

Moral of the story? Turn off your GPS every once in a while and look at a map. I promise you will feel like Magellan or Lewis and Clark – an explorer off to find new lands and new routes. And, if adventure isn’t your thing, do it for practical reasons. Namely, it makes you a more capable person. Using technology as an aid is not a bad thing, but relying on it to the point of forgetting how to do something for yourself doesn’t sound very smart to me.

– Kate Gallagher, advertising and editorial coordinator