Hanne

Squiggles and map books have never really got on. The lines on the page never quite seem to match up with his perception of direction. They remain straight and fixed and reach their destinations while he wanders off towards back roads and dead ends and left-not-rights. It will be interesting to see how he goes with the new generation of orienteering devices: today he bought a GPS.

This GPS has been a long time coming. The deal was that he had to learn to read a map before he was allowed a machine that did that for him. And the problem? Squiggles has no inbuilt compass. Several years ago he pulled me aside to confirm that he sun sets in the South and although his directional ability has increased dramatically since we cleared that one up he tends to leave the route planning to the Orienteers in the family.

Our trip to Napier is a case in point. It takes special skills to get lost on the Napier-Taupo highway. Navigating this section of road should be rather straightforward as there is not really anywhere else to go when you are riding a tl1000. After leaving Auckland at 9am and borrowing some lawnmower gas to make it to Cambridge (he was testing the range of the bike, of course) he reached Taupo in time for lunch. This is where the time warp started. At 5pm I got a call from Squiggles to say he was on the side of the road in a place called Eskdale and thought he had made a wrong turn. Three phone calls later he had found the airport. By nightfall he had located the hostel.

I can’t really blame Squiggles for the numerous times we have got lost in Hamilton because Hamilton tends to have that effect on everyone, trying to trap them within its identical suburbs by closing the main diversion road and putting major road works on the alternative route. Even my cousin at Waikato uni forgives him for that. Ending up in Northcote when taking the GN250 to Ponsonby for a job interview is slightly harder to explain.

More recently Magua set him the challenge of locating a railway line just north of Kaukapakapa. They left in the early afternoon for what should have been a leisurely two hour ride. At six pm I got a call from Wellsford. ‘We got a tad lost’. Magua did the navigating on the way home.

With such a dire track record, the GPS was looking more and more unattainable. In fact, it took a trip halfway around the world for Squiggles to finally find his bearings. In Hoi An, Vietnam, Squiggles had his moment to shine. He successfully
navigated us to three different dress shops using three of the crudest maps possible printed on the back of business cards. With many of the streets barely up to ‘alley’ standard, this was no mean feat. He had passed the test.

It will be interesting to see what happens now that we are back in New Zealand. While it is possible that the incident in Hoi An represented a recalibrating of Squiggles’ directional faculties, he now has a back up to assist him when following main highways. Ah, technology! The GN is no longer around to witness the occasion but at least the DR can rest easy knowing it won’t end up in Northcote instead of Ponsonby in a hurry.