War on Cancer

This past week, I attended a medical conference on treatments for gastrointestinal cancers (which include livers and pancreases, by the way). I learned a lot, but the most important thing I learned that day was not to implicitly trust Google Maps.

The conference was held at a hotel in Crystal City (geography lesson: the Virginia border near DC), and my husband and I had checked Google Maps the night before and figured out that since it was just as long for me to drive there as to take the Metro, I should take the Metro and thus save on parking.
So the morning of the GI oncology meeting, I put in the directions on my phone and rode to the directed stop, The Pentagon (which is also in Virginia across from DC). On exiting the station, I carefully chose to take the stairs that were for non-Pentagon-employees, then held out my phone in front of me like a water-divining-rod and started walking where my phone told me to go. It was tricky, because there aren't a whole lot of sidewalks around that particular war-focused building, but I did my best, and tried to look non-threatening as I walked past security guards, security fences, and security cameras.
I made it three-fifths of the perimeter of the Pentagon before realizing that Google was trying to get me into the Pentagon, the back way. Which is how I figured out that even though I had entered the correct address for the hotel, Google identified that address with a spot on the northeast side of the Department of Defense headquarters. No hotel in sight. I panicked at this point, because although I'm sure I looked non-threatening [except for the sunglasses and black trenchcoat, maybe], I definitely also looked out-of-place. And by entering the hotel name in Google Maps, I learned I was an hour walk away from my intended destination, back the way I came, and I didn't know how accessible I was to an Uber.

"Okay, you got this Sadie." I remembered passing a rental scooter a bit earlier, and decided to use that to speed up my return to the Metro Pentagon stop and continue on to the Crystal City Metro stop and then to the real 2399 VA 110 address. I conveniently already had that scooter's app on my phone, so I started the rental process...and discovered that the scooter had less than 1% battery and wasn't responding to my attempts to rent it.
I figured if the battery was that low, any sort of anti-theft programs probably wouldn't work, so I took it anyway and just used it as scooters were originally intended--push-power. It was faster than walking, but I definitely got over-warm from the unanticipated exercise.

I got to the conference 20 minutes late, which I thought was superb timing considering the 2-mile detour around the Pentagon. It did leave me sleepy, though.... I dozed through two of the morning presentations before I was able to rally again.

My husband Mark is very-much aware of my problems with logistics, so I called him before heading home so that we could laugh about the location mix-up. He reminded me to get on the correct train coming home, which was actually helpful because I had been on the train platform for the line going the opposite direction of what I wanted. I moved to the platform across the way, so proud that I had avoided another transportation complication...and then accidentally got on the wrong train. I had meant to use the yellow line, but had walked onto a blue line train car (they shared the same platform at that station) whose conductor kept announcing as the ORANGE line.

I decided that once reaching home, I was going to shelter-in-place.

I'd had enough disorientation for the day.