Technology Fail

On day #2 of driving, we found ourselves headed to NYC. Why do we always end up driving through NYC on holiday weekends??? This meant an extra several hours stuck in traffic. Plus it was smoggy and we couldn't even appreciate seeing the buildings from a distance.

As we continued our long drive north we decided that a vacation would not be complete without a stop at REI. We really needed a good camera case for our Canon Rebel and some USGS topo maps of the White and Green Mountains {some people collect pottery or stamps, we collect outdoor gear and maps of national forests}. With a little research, we found an REI in Connecticut that was on the way. When I punched the address into our {several-year-old} Garmin GPS I had to laugh. 

The route it wanted us to take was 3,176 miles long and projected to take us 54 hours and 23 minutes {it should have been about 235 miles with a projected traveling time of 4.5 hours}.

It wanted us to go in a counter-clockwise direction from Maryland... out through North Dakota... up through Manitoba, Canada... and across Canada before coming back into New England. Talk about a technology fail. While at REI we ended up buying a software upgrade for our poor, outdated GPS. *Unfortunately the software update is not compatible with Apple.

Update: We figured out the reason for the ridiculous routing was that we had it set to avoid toll roads!!! Obviously a bad option in NY state. Oops.

Computer Woes

How can it be that both of our home computers crapped out almost simultaneously? Actually this is not completely true as the PC has been on its way out for some time. We (meaning Daniel) just hasn't had (taken) the time to fix it. A small little virus slowly took over the PC until we found ourselves with a kaput hard drive. Then a week ago Sunday, Daniel tried to load a printer driver on the MAC and when he rebooted, it seemed the hard drive took the opportunity to die.

Having our computers die is one of the worst things that could happen. How do you expect a couple to communicate? Seriously, we chat often throughout the day and this is rather difficult when one spouse has no computer!!!

On Thursday Daniel bought a new hard drive for the PC and as soon as we have time to try to salvage anything off of the MAC, we will buy a new hard drive for it as well. This would all be much more manageable if it happened at a time that was NOT the CHRISTMAS season. Thankfully my brother was here for a few days and had his laptop with him, so we were not completely sans technology while Daniel fixed the PC.

I can live without a phone. I can live without television. I don't think I can live without my computer.