Did we miss our turn?

This past week about 28 of us from GCC went to the Catalyst Leadership conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Since I easily get car sick I volunteered several weeks ago to be one of the designated rental car drivers while we were there.

After a few minor roadblocks at the National counter, we all managed to get our car keys and our designated groups followed us to our car of choice. We had reserved SUV's but our group walked past a Saturn minivan and decided it would work well for us so we hopped in.

What should have been an eventless trip to our hotel became anything but that. Somewhere along the way we took the wrong fork in the road and ended up taking the entire 285 beltway around Atlanta before we got the exit that we actually needed to get to our hotel. What shouls have been a 45 minute drive became about 2 hours. As we pulled in to the Hyatt many of the other in our group were on their way out to dinner.

The next day, Thursday was our first day at the conference. It was suppose to end at 5:30 but went long and it was after 7 pm before we were actually let out. There were 11,000 people at this conference and 11,000 people trying to leave one parking lot all a the same time. We sat in the parking lot for a good 50 minutes before we finally made it out to the road. As if this wasn't bad enough, we misread our directions back to the hotel and again missed a turn. As we tooled down the highway in the dark, we started noting that nothing looked familiar. Before going too much further I pulled into a Walgreens parking lot and ran in to confirm our directions. Now that we were pointed in the right direction, things began to look familiar and we finally made it back to the hotel. We had a group dinner at the hotel that night to debrief on the days events. As you may have imagined, we were late to the the group dinner but fortunately there was some food left for us. We scarfed our food down and started in on the group debrief.

When we arrived at the convention center Friday morning for some reason the traffic directors sent us down to a lower lot. I'm not sure why because there were plenty of parking spaces left where we had parked the previous day but you go where they send you. The parking was actually closer to the center and an exit as well so we thought we had done good! The conference got out on time Friday and we made our way to the minivan. Just as we thought, because we were close to the exit we got right out of the parking lot. Problem was we didn't exit onto the road we entered the convention center on. The street we needed to be on was Sugar Loaf parkway. Lori saw a sign that said Sugar Loaf Circle so we figured it must either run into or be close to Sugar Loaf Parkway and it actually deadended into it. Problem is we turned the wrong way and ended up venturing into more unknown territory. After realizing, once again that things didn't look familiar, we turned around. Land marks became more and more familiar and we were once again going the right way.

This morining we were bound and determined that we were not going to get lost going back to the airport. I went to the front desk and got fresh directions from them and we asked one of the other groups if we could follow them as well. How could anything possibly go wrong! We were on their tail all the way back to the airport. I was so relieved when we entered the airport and thougth to myself we've got it made now. We got to the National lot and I wasn't really sure where we had to turn into so I kept following the car in front of us. But he went past the National lot. Next thing I know we're leaving the rental car area. How can this be happening!! Not long after that Jeff called from the car ahead. They forgot they had to fill up their SUV before returning it. Fortunately all we had to do was follow the signs back to the rental car area as they turned off and went to get gas. Even our best laid plan ended up with a glitch.

The good thing about all of our mishaps was that no one ever got upset about it. We laughed about it and reminded ourselves that we were "making memories!"