Points of Interest: A brief history of getting lost.

In the historic spectrum of people with a great sense of direction, we have Ferdinand Magellan at one end and my parents on the other. For four years, I lived in the same condo in Boston; they live about twenty miles north-in a town in which they both grew up. You'd think they'd be experts on the greater Boston area by this point. And yet, over the span of four years, they never did completely solve the riddle of how to find my place. I'd usually get a phone call from my mom, roughly coincident with their estimated time of arrival, saying: "Remind me, again, where you go when you get off the highway. We're looking at some buildings, and there's a traffic light, and, uhh . . . hmm, everything seems to be in Chinese."

So last Christmas, I got them a portable GPS. The upshot is that now they know how to find me. On the downside, now they know how to find me (kidding, Mom, kidding). But the incredible thing is that these people who could get lost on the way from the front door to the end of the driveway can now find their way to their destination, albeit usually while wearing out the TomTom's auto-rerouting function. Getting lost is a thing of the past.

It took us quite a while to get here, as human beings are inferior to salmon when it comes to finding our way around. First, there were guides. I recently visited a waterfall in Canada where, according to lore, the Sioux once captured a woman from a rival tribe and then pressed her into service as a guide to lead them back for another attack. They probably realized the flaw of this strategy right about the moment she led them over the waterfall.

Then came maps. The problem with maps is that either they cover a small area in great detail or a wide area but only with the roads you could see from space. On a college trip through Switzerland, I encountered both aspects of that problem in a single day. Trying to leave the town of Lucerne, my then-girlfriend navigated us onto a street that led into a parking garage. After paying to get back out, I took over and soon had us climbing a mountain road on our way to Zermatt. As we gained altitude, our Citroën Saxo's 50 hp diminishing with each switchback, I noticed that the road seemed strangely desolate-in one tunnel, the overhead lights were turned off. By the time I neared the top of the pass, the car didn't have enough power to get out of second gear, but that was a smaller problem than the glacier across the road. It turns out that the pass was closed in winter, a detail our mapmaker apparently judged inconsequential.

Which is why MapQuest was such a revelation. Once the Internet got plugged in, you could have turn-by-turn directions to your destination. There's absolutely no way you can get lost with MapQuest. No way at all. Except for missing a turn. That'll derail everything. Remember when Anne Heche turned up at somebody's house, all nonsensical and confused several years ago? I'm pretty sure that trip started with MapQuest.

Then came the increased use of GPS, one of the best inventions of the past 1000 years. GPS was originally developed by the military in order to show East Germans how to leave. Once that was accomplished, the military decided to let the rest of us use it, which is kind of like NASA handing out free shuttle rides. Now you can get a factory GPS system in just about any car. Although, if you ask me, you really shouldn't.

Car companies haven't seemed to cotton to the fact that you can walk into a RadioShack and buy a GPS for less than $100. Otherwise, they wouldn't be trying to charge $1500 for a built-in system that's tedious to update and even more problematic to take on vacation when you rent a car. Plus, on my TomTom, you can get directions from Mister T. Which is always funny for the couple minutes before it becomes really annoying.

I suppose that GPS systems remove some of the chance encounters that enliven a trip. But their role in mitigating frustration more than compensates. I could sit here and expound on the beauty and romance of the unknown road, the timeless mystery of an unpremeditated path. But the truth is, getting lost is an exercise in fear, anxiety, and recriminations. If getting lost is your idea of romance, then you're probably German and own a dungeon. In fact, there's a little TV show on ABC that you may have heard of-it's set on a strange and horrifying island populated with unknowable monsters and scheming villains, and the protagonists are beset with perpetual confusion. The show is not called, "I made it to my destination without incident."

The children of today will never know the feeling of missing a turn. They'll never know the joyless relief of finding a roach-filled hotel and thinking, "What a lucky evening; now I don't have to sleep in the car." And there's no reason they'll ever find themselves on a highway wondering how many miles it is until the next Starbucks. Those are inconveniences people faced in the olden times, like polio or leprosy.

I embrace GPS, but my tech-love might stop short of Internet-enabled GPS. Because plain-old dumb GPS, despite fixing your location, doesn't make judgments about your destination. There's still an element of mystery to the journey. On a road trip in a Nissan Armada a few years back, I relied heavily on the "point of interest" function on the GPS, and it turned up some hits and some misses. Sometimes you'd find a beautiful golf course with a $10 special; sometimes you'd pull up in front of a restaurant to find the health department nailing up plywood over the bullet holes. But at the end of the day, you could always find your hotel.

When I got back to Boston, I played around with the Armada's nav system to find out what point-of-interest roulette would suggest for various categories. Under "nightlife," the top hits for the city included a smattering of Irish pubs, one strip joint, and a bar where the ladies tend to have unusually prominent Adam's apples, if you catch my drift. So if you were a stranger in the city, the Armada's GPS might suggest an evening that includes a few major surprises, to say the least.

Now I have an iPhone, so on a given trip I could not only know where my hotel is, but what the last guy who slept there Twittered about it. And that, I'm afraid, is a little disappointing. I don't want to get lost, but sometimes it's nice when you don't know exactly where you're going.

Written by: Ezra Dyer
Illustration: Tim Marrs