How Google almost killed me
I thought I would go over my trip to Pacific City, Oregon last weekend for my girlfriend's 21st birthday so that perhaps I could save some unsuspecting youngster from plummeting to his death! You may not think a search engine could kill a person but Google nearly did.
I hadn't been to Pacific City in a while so I decided to use Google Maps to find the route, as I do before any road trip. I love Google Maps. On the way to the beach, I was thinking how different my life has been in the year and a half that I've been using it. I sometimes sit and just look at other cities or my own city via satellite. I've even discovered areas of Portland I never knew existed. Were you aware that there is 23 square miles of park in the middle of the city?! Neither did I and I've lived here my whole life!
Anyway, going to Pacific City was uneventful but I had to go back a different way because we stopped in Woodburn to visit the outlet mall on the way to. So I put my trust in faithful Google to find the directions from Pacific City to Portland. Around the time that the pavement ended I started to think that might have been a bad idea. At one point we were traveling on logging roads in the Cascade Mountains on loose gravel with no cell phone reception, no power lines, and the only signs of life were a stray dog in the middle of the road, empty beer cans sporadically littered to the side of the road, and a cross on the side of the road. There were no houses or other cars for about 30 minute stretches- which was probably a good thing because it was a one-lane road and I probably would not have seen another car coming around the bend in time to swerve into the ditch! I made it out alive but I'm telling you that had it been raining, snowing (which it is in the satellite photos), or dark, my chance of survival would have been slight. It's a good thing I had a full tank.
Has this ever happened to anyone else? My only other bad experience with Maps was a road that I was supposed to turn left on but legally couldn't (in fact there was a concrete divider, so physically I couldn't either). I heard there was a couple a few months ago who ended up lost in the mountains and died. Does anyone have any horror stories of following the advice of a Maps service? And I wonder if these situations could be a legal concern for map providers. I would assume they have some kind of non-disclaimer that I've failed to read.
Comments
I got a good laugh out of your story. In '88 when Steve and I were working for the Department of Justice at several correctional institutes in Florida we had several of those experiences. Most of the institutes were of the beaten path on dirt or gravel roads with little indication, if any, that there would be something at the end of the road. We did laugh through the majority of them. Those days it was a paper map, no cell phone, and swamp land all around (oh, and gators, too)
Your trip from Pacific City to Portland reminds me of some of the dirt roads I've been on in Wyoming and Colorado. They're great for summer weekend excursions, as long as you're prepared and know in advance that it isn't going to snow.