Yesterday I got myself well and truly lost in an area with no cell service.

It’s okay. That was more or less the point.

I started the morning by exploring around Lake Placid, scouting locations to view the next day’s eclipse. Then I went a little further afield, checking out a couple of villages ten and twenty miles away that my innkeepers had mentioned. Result: there are no bad options in an area with so much beauty.

So I decided I’ll just keep it simple. Walk into downtown Lake Placid by the lake. Play it by ear. By eye, I guess.

But that begged the question: what to do with the rest of the day?

Suddenly a memory surfaced. August 1998. My new husband driving us from the first half of our two-week honeymoon in rural Vermont to the second half in Montreal. In between, we passed through some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever witnessed. Where was it? The Thousand Islands, maybe? Is that close?

Well, it turns out, that depends what your definition of “close” is. A hundred miles of mountain and farm-country roads… is that close?

Close enough.

Off I went. I didn’t plan; just picked a destination on the far side of a loooong bridge to some island smack-dab in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. I had a grocery bag of snackies I’d packed from home, a bottle of water and a tank of gas that were both mostly full, and GPS directions.

That last point was the weakest link in my non-plan, obviously. I am bereft of a sense of direction. I’m not terrible at retracing my steps, but navigating without GPS? Nope. And even so, I can generally be counted on to start off in the wrong direction. “Do I turn left or right out of the parking lot? Um I think left? But I’m always wrong so I’ll go right. Dang it, that didn’t work, shoulda picked left after all!!” That is literally how I roll. And there I was, heading off into the wild blue yonder where I probably would lose signal at least part of the time.

Okay then. It would be an adventure. For the sake of adventure. For the sake of not regretting that I’d played it safe, if I didn’t go. For the sake of why TF not.

The drive was, in fact, amazing. Twisting two-lane mountain roads lined with snow-draped pines giving way to rolling farm hills dotted with tidy prosperous barns and their picturesquely tumbledown ancestors. And then the wide, wide river, sparkling in late-afternoon spring sun and ridiculously full of rocky islands poking their heads up from the water to beg for a visit.

When the bridge appeared before me, I was not prepared. It’s an elegant green double-tower suspension arch. And when I say elegant, I mean thin as a metal ribbon, arching high HIGH HIGH above the river, which I couldn’t look at because I was too busy breathing deeply and forbidding my bumper to touch anything it wasn’t supposed to and ignoring the fact that I would clearly need to drive back again over the same span.

The pin I’d dropped at near-random in “Thousand Islands Park” turned out to be… not a park. It’s an exclusive enclave of pricey homes where everyone drives golf carts. A dusty 2004 Honda Civic with a bug-splattered windshield? Not so much. But I smiled and waved like a new neighbor and quickly grabbed this panoramic photo that doesn’t do justice to the view everyone else was paying for. I may not belong economically, but whiteness gets you accepted in most places and it was fine, it was totally fine, except for one thing.

That island is so darn exclusive, it apparently doesn’t allow in cell phone signal. Not mine, anyway.

The sun hung low in the sky by this point. I’d taken the long way there, but I hadn’t intended to go back by the same route post-bridge. The plan was to take a more direct path back to my cozy B&B, minimizing nighttime driving on narrow unfamiliar roads. Except, of course, that there had not been an actual plan.

Nothing exciting is about to happen in this story. I’d refilled the tank; the snacks were holding out just fine; I was out of water but upstate New York is not a desert and a slow death by desiccation was not an imminent threat.

For the next little while, all that happened was me deciding to take the nearby interstate that I thought was probably maybe possibly heading in the right direction, putting the pedal to the metal, and talking to myself. “Nothing bad is happening. Really. You can always just retrace your steps until you get signal again. Everything is fine. Everything is fine. You can take all the time you need. There’s no rush.”

And I felt fine, too. Mostly. This was the adventure I’d meant to have.

But fine or not, that didn’t change the fact that I was living a good old elementary-school Rate Time and Distance story problem, wasn’t I? “If Andie drives for ten minutes at seventy miles an hour, how far has she traveled?”

More to the point: Has she traveled towards her destination or away from it? Cannot be determined from the information provided, as the SATs put it.

When I pulled into a gas station for a map and realized the station itself was abandoned… that’s when I realized it was time to turn around and resign myself to the retracing option.

Next came golden-hour light illuminating stubbly early-spring plowed fields, followed by a spectacular pink-and-purple painted sunset that hung in my rear view as I drove towards darkness.

And still no GPS. I mean, wtf? This was getting silly. Surely I’d had signal by now on the way out, hadn’t I?

The voice of an utterly bored tech-support engineer spoke in my head. “Yeah. Have you tried rebooting it?”

I pulled over. I rebooted my phone. I looked at all the signal bars that had suddenly sprung to life. I laughed, restarted my tunes (Breakup Bangers playlist ftw), and got going again.

In the opposite direction from where I’d been heading. Of course. I am nothing if not consistent.

I do change, though.

I liked pushing my little comfort zone yesterday. It felt like a good challenge. Nobody died.

Driving back in the darkness wasn’t even a challenge. I’m not sure when I ever decided I wasn’t good at that.

This is what I like about my time alone these days.

I’ve spent so much of my life worrying about Doing It Right. Not messing things up, not inconveniencing or disappointing anyone.

But when it’s just me, I can take the risk. Enjoy taking it. And learn to trust myself.

Made it back to town just in time for a big tasty plate of chicken parm at a restaurant on Main Street. Right near where I’m sitting now. Waiting for the moon to take its first bite out of the sun in twenty minutes on the way to totality.

Looks like the cloud cover won’t interfere. We’ll see. I’m sure I’ll have more to tell you tomorrow. But either way, I’m calling this trip a success already.

Onwards. ☀️🌑🤩💖