New GPS Route

My first GPS came as a gift from my son.  I didn't know what it was, but within a use or two, it became a driving essential.  I've replaced it once.  With my current car, I subscribed to Toyota's Scout GPS for a year, found it too fallible, and now use a free WAZE app on my car phone.  I still keep paper maps in a pouch slung behind the driver's seat.  Not understanding the algorithm's at all, and to familiar destinations I often know better directions than the path the device takes me, I still usually defer to this anonymous wizardry when I have someplace else to go.

It took me on a different end route to and from the annual State Fair yesterday.  I have been going for years.  It takes place at the most central town of my state, while I live within walking distance of the neighboring state.  Easy driving.  Interstate to the main interchange, enter highway that we take to the beach, past the state capital, shift to the main road that connects the state's northern and southern borders and the Fair is a few minutes south.  WAZE took me on the highways but extended my distance there.  It directed me off at an intersection of a more rural setting, a small road, or series of roads but still with a state highway number, that connects the beach route with the north-south main road.  That north-south road still has utility.  I drive portions of it near my home frequently and is still a road people drive to reach the southern border.  As such, towns once set up along its route, initially to support agriculture on either side.  Some of those farm machinery places, grain storage, and construction outfits still exist there, though more has been repurposed to fast food, gas stations, and mini-malls with pharmacies and groceries.  That's a chunk of driving for people heading to the State Fair, though I would often stop at the DQ just off the interchange to buy one of their Blizzards to sip on my way to the fairgrounds.

Instead, WAZE took me through mostly agricultural territory.  Cornfields maturing with the ears visible as I drove past.  Fields of lower height plants.  Irrigation apparatus.  There was minimal retail activity, one pizza place which also advertised from the road.  And the giant employer, ILC Dover which makes spacesuits and other high-end research intensive products, once run by an old friend, long since passed.  A few hundred cars in their lot, and competitive salaries for its researchers and managers enabling some of the higher end housing visible from the road.  One school, an elementary school, older but of handsome brick.  I got to the north-south road just a mile or two from the State Fair destination, bypassing some ten miles of relative visual blight and traffic lights that my usual route would have generated.

My most pleasant ride to the State Fair.