Baby. You Can Drive My Car.

So that was fun.

I decided to head down to the UCI area to grab a sandwich @ Lee's for lunch. 

On Campus Street, I notice that the opposing traffic is backed up about 3 or 4 stoplights because there is some serious construction happening in one of the lanes up ahead and they've narrowed down a normally 4 lane area (a left turn lane, a right turn lane and 2 straight ahead lanes) into one lane. So, I make a mental note to figure out some other way back to work.

As I pull into the parking lot, I realize that the light in my car reminding me that I am driving on a virtually empty tank has been on for well over 24 hours and that I have yet to get gas.  So, I head into Lee's, order a boring sandwich (my fault... I picked a boring one because the menu was so big and I was under so much pressure to decide quickly) and a really disappointing Iced Tea (their fault - some melon-hibiscus crap that was clearly NOT brewed anywhere in the vicinity of the store.. if brewed anywhere. It tasted like air freshener.  It was probably made of some kind of noxious liquid "tea" formula) and scarf it while I attempt to look up gas stations on my phone.

Gas stations in Irvine... not the easiest thing to find.  I found a travel wiki page explaining that Irvine likes to hide gas stations.  Great. 

I find a security guard who tells me that the nearest gas station is about 3 stoplights away in the direction opposite of the direction I need to go to get back to work and that it is tucked behind a big wall on the far corner of the intersection.  That's fine, I find it pretty easily, fill-er-up and begin planning my return to work to avoid that backed up Campus Street.

I don't have a GPS and I don't pay for the GPS feature on my phone... but I figure if I go over one street I can just take that down to the main road past where all the construction is happening and be on my merry way.

While this may be true of every other part of Irvine, the law of master-planning does not apply at UCI. 

I found myself on a flowery road rolling through the hills with no turns into any other major streets.  For some reason I convinced myself that if I just kept plowing on ahead, I would definitely hit another street.  I refused to turn around and backtrack to my original intersection and sit in that horrid traffic on Campus.  Because that's what a barbarian would do. Clearly.

At one point a DHL truck came out of a building and I decided to follow it... because it had to be going somewhere, right?

And it was.

20 minutes later I ended up in a relatively recognizable area of Newport Beach about 15 minutes away from my office.  The driver of the DHL truck probably thought I was stalking him. 

Yeah.

At least it was a nice drive. 

And no traffic.