Friday, August 27, 2010

Traveling Mercies

For his birthday, my mom got my dad a GPS. He drives a lot, and sometimes gets lost, so it was an appropriate gift. I (for reasons to be detailed in a later post) was against it, but it wasn't my gift to un-give.

So I was very happy when I came home from my travels in New England to learn that dad had gotten rid of the GPS.

"I couldn't understand it," he said, "It wouldn't let you see ahead about the choices it was making" (a complaint with which I wholly agree), "and it said this word, this word I didn't understand."

"Ahn-roft," he said the word was. I puzzled and puzzled, through English, through rudimentary German and Spanish, but got nothing. "On ramp?" "Off ramp?"

"I decided," he said, "before I returned it, that it was a word of blessing. A travel blessing for the road. Turn right. Ahn-roft."

So, in the spirit of the now-returned GPS:

Ahn-roft, to all you travelers in distant lands.

1 comment:

Cecelia said...

I've been racking my brain, but I can't figure out what the GPS could have been trying to say. But for now at least, I like it as a new travel blessing.