Trying to remember the line of a song that references Ferdinand Magellan and failing.

I'm getting the road trip itch again.

This time, it's not because I haven't journeyed more than 50 miles from my house in the past two weeks (was it really just two weeks ago that I spent more than 8 hours in my car?). It's because of a new gadget I acquired this evening.

I am now a proud owner of a Magellan Roadmate 1212. That's a GPS, for those who don't know. I haven't played with it much yet because it needs to charge. The only charger that came with it is one for the car, so it is currently outside sitting in a cup holder. And I am waiting patiently inside.

I made the decision to purchase this device relatively quickly according to my standards. I've been thinking for a while that I would like to have one, but didn't seriously consider it more than a couple of days. I'm one of those people who visits Google Maps nearly daily, indicating that I'm always wondering where some place is located, usually in relation to me, and usually so that I can see if planning a trip is plausible. When you spend a great deal of time traversing pavement, a GPS makes sense. For a while, however, I have contented myself with finding directions on the Internet, and hoping that I'm not such a terrible navigator that I end traveling hundreds of miles in the wrong direction. On the whole, that strategy has worked well enough.

Until two weeks ago, that is. I think that particular incident pushed me over the edge, and made me seriously consider that having a GPS would be a good thing.

What incident am I referring to? Oh, yeah, I never did share this experience with you, did I?

Jason Gray was playing at the Mall at Johnson City in East Tennessee. My brother and I wanted to go and we invited friends to accompany us. One of them started the journey with us here at our house, the other one we were going to pick up on the way at her school in Jefferson City. I started the trip optimistically, but between here and Jefferson City, I got lost. More than once. One wrong turn this way, backtracking, another wrong turn, more backtracking, etc. We finally made it to Jefferson City, then I made another couple of wrong turns trying to leave town. We made it to the mall one hour and fifteen minutes after the concert was supposed to start. I was hoping that Jason would still be standing around and we could say "hi" at least. By the time we found the stage five minutes later, there was a crew tearing everything down and Jason was nowhere to be found.

Needless to say, I was disappointed. I had fun, don't get me wrong. We chilled in the mall for a while, then managed to spend over an hour and a half in a Books-A-Million and didn't even make it around the whole store before we were forced to leave due to it closing. But driving that far away to see someone then not seeing them is a bit of a letdown.

I'd really like it if that didn't happen again. I'm hoping that old Ferdinand's namesake will help to ensure that it doesn't.

If things go as planned, I'll have a chance to test it for the first time in about two weeks, on, incidentally, another trip to see Jason Gray. It's funny, to my mind at least, to think that my love of live music inspired the purchase of a navigation aid. :-)