Biggest wrong turning
Imagine getting the car loaded up ready for a little road trip, doing 51 miles of your 64-mile journey and coming across a "diversion" sign on the motorway... not to worry, you think to yourself, it shouldn't put us too far behind our scheduled arrival time.
So, you take the next junction to follow the diversion route, and whilst coming around the roundabout to get yourself back onto the motorway as signposted, your sat nav recalibrates and tells you that you have a whole FOURTY MILES left of your journey!
There's no other way you can go, no A-road route to get there, so you just have to stick it out and commit to an extra 1.5 hours in the car to get to your destination.
That's exactly what happened to me and Alfie when we were going to Faversham Pools a few weeks ago! But what can you do - I didn't want to turn back and head home because then we'd have wasted the hour of travelling we'd already done and added over 50 miles onto the clock for nothing. So I begrudgingly plodded on and did what the sat nav told me to do until we arrived.
I tried not to let it bother me or affect the rest of the day as, in the grand scheme of things, it was a minor obstacle... just a very inconvenient one.
I was reading something recently that struck a chord and made me want to look at these incidences in a completely different way, especially on days where it feels like the world is against me and everything is going wrong. It said something like, imagine if the universe puts that in the way to prevent something bad from happening. For example, if you can't find your keys when you're leaving the house in the morning so leave five minutes later than usual or than you need to, and those 5 extra minutes being the reason you avoid getting into a car crash that day ... or maybe the universe knew I needed that extra hour to just breathe and be present after a hectic week at work and home, so gave it to me in the form of a longer drive to our destination.
I'm not sure if I believe in a bigger place, bigger being, or bigger plan, but I do think some things happen for a reason.
It's amazing how your thought process on inconveniences can change your experience of them in the moment.
What's the biggest wrong turn you've taken? Or longest diversion you've followed?
I have a friend who thought she knew the way home from where she was so didn't consider putting her home address into the sat nav before she set off, and she got over 40 miles down the motorway in the wrong direction before realising she was heading the wrong way!
Anyway, she's told me she doesn't fail to put that postcode in now, even if she knows for certain where she is and how she gets home... just to be on the safe side.