Site of a Lesson Learned

Because it's been really cold here in Mid-Missouri (Mid-Misery), I have been playing around with the street view feature of Google Maps. I've been "driving" all over towns I used to live in or even ones that I just traveled through. I decided that I would do a screen capture of certain places so I could use them as an illustration for some blog postings.

The cool thing about blogs is that a person (me) can pretend that some minor event is really publish-worthy, rather than just a little boring story that no one but the blogger is interested in. With this in mind, I will try not to show a picture and only say something like "hey! that's where I got my gall bladder ultrasounded."

So here's the first story in this series:

Way back in the summer on 1990, I was heading south from Missouri to look over a couple of graduate schools I'd been accepted to. I was either going to go to the University of Georgia or the University of South Carolina. I'd also been accepted to the University of Hawaii, but had decided not to go there.

I'd packed up my little red Escort GT full of my stuff and was driving south to find a school and a place to live. I'd love to be able to do that sort of thing now--just pack everything up and move somewhere without much of a plan. But when you get older, you often lose this freedom.

Anyway, I was driving through a town called Fayetteville, Tennessee and wanted to stop for the night. I had supper at the Shoney's in the picture below. It was after I finished eating that I learned an important lesson:

If you are in a town you've never been in before and ask someone for directions, and that individual starts his directions by saying "You know where the old jail used to be," you should just answer in the affirmative. You probably won't understand the directions that follow.