Project Happily Ever After

My husband is the stereotypical man when it comes to asking for directions. I believe this is why he generally always knows where he is at any given time. He’s spent so much time driving aimlessly in his car or riding aimlessly on his bike that he knows every single road in every state he’s ever lived or visited.

It’s either that or he has an incredible sense of direction. Whatever the reason, the end result is the same: we rarely fight about his inability to ask for directions because he rarely ever needs them.

This, however, was no comfort to me when, in the weeks leading up to our trip, my husband began spending hour upon hour surfing the Internet in search of a GPS map that depicted a trail to the top of Mt. Liamuiga, a 3,000 foot dormant volcano. He wanted to hike to the top of said volcano, but he had a problem. Every single island guide said the same thing: “Hire a guide.” Now, you may not need me to interpret this for you but, just in case you do, here goes. According to men who hate to ask for directions, hiring a guide is the equivalent of asking for directions.

“We don’t need a stinking guide!” my husband repeatedly complained as he searched for a map of the volcano trail system. “My GPS can get us to the top.”

“You know,” I said, “We’ve hiked in a lot of places. None of them recommended using a guide. I’m thinking if everyone says we need a guide, we probably need a guide.”

He didn’t see it that way. Rather, Mr. Strong and Silent gave me a look that said, “I’ll hire a guide over my dead body.”

I imagined us wandering around, lost in the mountain rain forest. Thankfully, we’d have plenty of mangos and bananas to eat, but we’d surely eventually die from exposure or, worse, bugs. I imagined the headline in USA Today: “American couple disappears on volcano hike. Island officials say, ‘We told you so.’”

On the day of the trip, Mr. Strong and Silent still had no map of the trails, but he packed his GPS anyway.

During our first few days on the island, he talked to the concierge, various taxi drivers, and any native who would look his way. “Can we take a bus to the trailhead,” he asked a travel agent. She said, “Oh no. You need a guide.”

“Can you drive us to the trailhead?” he asked a taxi driver.

“Oh no,” Taxi Mon said. “You need a guide.” Now, taxi drivers on St. Kitts are the ultimate hustlers. You can’t walk down an island street without at least 5 different taxi drivers trying to pick you up. If a cabbie told us we needed a guide, we needed a guide.

Dejected, my husband asked me, “Do you really want to do it with a guide? It’s up to you.”

I thanked the heavens above, and I said, “Yes, let’s get a guide.”

“Okay, I guess we can look into it tomorrow,” he said, deflated. He was Eeyore, minus his tail.

I wanted to cheer him up. I wanted to give him something to do with his GPS.

“I wonder how far it is to the Shiggity Shack?” I mused.

Suddenly, he morphed into Mr. Perky. “Let’s walk there. I’ll use my GPS.”

So we did.

As we walked, he continually fiddled with various buttons on the GPS. Then, over rum drinks at the Shiggity Shack, he gave me the lowdown. “It was .8 of a mile,” he said. “Do you want to see what the route looks like?”

“Show me! Show me!” I said, trying to sound as excited as a child who is offered a free vacation to Disney World.

“Well this here is the island,” he said. It looked like a big blob to me, but I nodded my head, showing that I found the information very enlightening.

“This squiggly line here is the route we took to get from the hotel to the Shiggity Shack,” he said.

“Wow,” I said. It looked like, well, a line.

“Here’s a little hill,” he said.

“What do you know,” I said. It looked like… a line.

And that was that. During the rest of the trip, Mr. Strong and Silent mapped out various walking routes. Each day he left with his little handheld device, walked around, and came back to show me where he’d been.

When we did the volcano hike, we did it with a guide. The guide guided me, holding my hand to steady me on the rocky terrain, suggesting where I should put my hands and feet on some of the more technical sections and, at one point, carrying me because I was too short to shimmy down from one boulder to another.

My husband? He didn’t use the guide. He simply walked behind me, with his GPS in his pocket. All the while that little gadget tracked our route. Once we arrived home in Pennsylvania, my husband uploaded it to the Internet so men from this day forward will never ever have to ask for directions to the top of Mt. Liamuiga.

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Tags: asking for directions, Marriage Advice, men and directions, relationship advice

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 10:42 am and is filed under Marriage Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.