UK Adventure Part 3: Watch Those Google Maps—They’ll Get Ya!

Us and the Ashton family

Thank you so much for joining me on my trip across the UK! We’ve travelled across Ireland and back, and now we go to my favorite place in all of England: Manchester, the site of my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I served my mission from 2010–2011 and went back five years later, visiting some good friends in one area and going to church with friends in another. Now I was about ten years out from my mission, and yet the kind people of Manchester still welcomed me into their homes. I got to hang out with the wonderful Ashton family and introduce them to Bobby, and Bobby and I stayed with the awesome Caffery family. We went to church with them at the Oldham ward, and it was kind of crazy to see the girls who were Young Women when I knew them all grown up and leading the ward.

As for the Google Maps adventure, that happened after church, when Bobby and I decided to go to Dovestones. It’s a beautiful reservoir surrounded by walking paths as well as some small mountains that, while I couldn’t find a clearly defined trail to the top, are climbable (that was a different visit).

Dovestones was only a 10-minute drive from church, but I didn’t exactly remember the way, so I pulled up Google Maps to navigate. Since I didn’t have an international data plan, we were using downloaded, offline maps, and that is the only explanation I have for what happened next.

We were driving along, and we made a wrong turn. (This is not uncommon for me. If you remember from last week’s post, my poor navigating skills was one of the factors that almost made us late for our flight.) So Google Maps rerouted our path, like it does, and we started following the new instructions to get there.

Never trust Google Maps. At least not downloaded ones. About fifteen minutes later, we were still driving, with no sign of the reservoir in sight. Now, you might think I should have remembered the way to the reservoir enough to know that we were going off-track, but it had been five years since I’d been to Dovestones, I am directionally challenged, and I had an unfounded trust in Google, so we merrily followed this other path until we realized that it was taking way too long and we didn’t know where we were. Upon further inspection, we realized that instead of directing us to turn around and drive the additional five minutes to our destination, Google Maps had given us a new route that went thirty minutes out of our way through the hills and tiny backroads of England. And at that point, turning around wouldn’t have been any faster than continuing.

Adventure, you say! And it was, to some extent, but the truth is that we were really hungry and ready to get to Dovestones so we could eat lunch. And the roads were really narrow and accented with hairpin turns that had me closing my eyes and Bobby focusing hardcore. And I had to keep eagle eyes on the map at all times to make sure there was no more funny business. And then add the new driving time to the time we spent pulling over to eat something in an industrial parking lot so we wouldn’t be super hangry, and when all was said and done, we got to Dovestones nearly an hour after we’d planned to.

Annnnnnd that was when we found out that everyone in Oldham had had the same idea for Sunday afternoon recreation, and the car park was packed to the gills. We had almost decided to just give up and go back to the Cafferys when we got lucky and someone pulled out at just the right time for us to slide in. Small miracles. Once we were there, it was very nice—a cool day but not too cold, nice for a walk. We discovered an area where people could donate a tree in memory of a loved one, and we spent a while wandering and looking at different names on trees. If we’d had longer, we would have gone around the lake, but our detour had cost us, so we went back after not too long to be treated to my favorite English meal—a Sunday roast dinner—before hopping on a train to Scotland.

This week’s post was more chill, but every trip needs a breather, right? Next week will be a break since I’m going on a new adventure, but after that, we’ll be in Scotland—standing on the Devil’s Pulpit. Dun dun dun.

On the train, about to watch some BYU football