Recalculating...

Tomorrow night the symphony will give a performance in Tellico Village. We go to Tellico every year and it's one of my favorite runouts because it is close and the audience always packs the hall.

The first year I played with the symphony the principal second violinist and I carpooled to Tellico. It was Julie's first year as well so neither of us had been to Tellico. Now, driving directions from the symphony have vastly improved, but at that time they weren't always the greatest. Julie and I had been told horror stories of directions that included instructions such as, "Take I-40 North" or "turn left at the place where they tore down Captain D's." This might have worked out okay for someone who had lived here long enough to know where Captain D's used to be but we were terrified. I pictured us driving down the road searching for the remains of buildings past; unwilling archaeologist-musicians on an impossible quest to find our performance space.

We never got directions quite that bad, but on a previous occasion we had carpooled together to a runout to Lincoln Memorial University, followed the symphony directions, and were quite surprised when we found ourselves heading back toward downtown Knoxville in the absolute wrong direction.

With this experience fresh in our minds we set out for Tellico Village with a lot of extra time. It was a good thing, too, because we needed it. Our directions said to turn right. What they didn't say was that there were two streets with the same name in Tellico Village. We saw the road named on the directions. It was on the left, but we figured the directions were wrong so we turned. It was a bad decision. We found ourselves in a neighborhood. We quickly realized our mistake and flagged down a man mowing his lawn. He wasn't much help and seemed very suspicious of two women dressed head to toe in black formal attire. We started panicking. This was obviously the wrong way but we were on the right road. On a hunch, Julie headed back to the main road. Five minutes farther up we found the second road by the same name, on the right this time. THIS was the correct road. We made it to the concert with a few minutes to spare for warming up.

Now, nine seasons later, I know how to get to Tellico, but tomorrow I plan to take the GPS just in case.