It began as all great adventures do, with a complete disregard for any fundamental planning, but poor planning is fate’s accomplice. Since my usual company car had a giant crack across the windshield and I was advised not to take it out of the city, I would have to wait and see if I could get a loaner car from Raytheon. On Tuesday, a day before I headed out, I was granted a new vehicle. I traded a white Ford Focus that I wasn’t supposed to drive out of the city with a Gray Ford Focus that I wasn’t supposed to drive out of the city.
I compiled a short list of places to see from my students, some of whom grew up where I was going, on that same Tuesday. I tossed my camping gear in the car and made myself some sandwiches and snacks the night before. After work on Wednesday I left straight from the base.
Unfortunately, there was a bit of a blind spot where my map of the city of Jeddah ended and where the roads from Jeddah scythed toward the coast road on my map of all of Saudi. Somewhere in the nevernever land between the two maps was the turn I was supposed to take. An hour after I left the base the car was barreling straight toward Mecca, with the enormous clock tower growing in the center of the windshield. For the uninitiated, I am not allowed within 30 miles of Mecca. There are signs warning away non-Muslims at all the entrances to the city, and police checkpoints posted at said entrances. They didn’t glance my way when they waved me through. I made it through another two police checkpoints equally unmolested, and I had a decision in front of me.
I was earnestly looking for a way to turn around, but once inside the first checkpoint all roads lead to Mecca. When I was within three miles of the holy of holies there was an exit toward my destination, and though I will probably regret it for a long time, I took it. As much as I wanted to go, mostly because they won’t let me, I was woefully unprepared for infiltration. I was alone, with only western clothes, during Ramadan, when Saudis are especially pissy, and more apt to feign sensitivity to their religion.
These are just excuses though, I pussied out and I know it.
From that exit, so close to the heart of the Muslim world, I was moving due East, and trying to figure out how to go due South. My little detour and wanderings had set me back a good hour and a half, and I was entering the most dangerous driving time on planet Earth, Saudi Arabia a few hours before Iftar (the sunset meal when Muslims break the Ramadan fast).
I had heard through a fairly reliable grapevine that the day before a Filipino fisherman, after taking his catch into the fishmarket in Jeddah, had ducked into a dark corner to smoke a well deserved cigarette. Some Saudi caught him and called over the Muttawa (the religious police). Within minutes his work permit was revoked and he was packing his bags. His boss, who was on hand, could only shrug his shoulders. He’d broken the fast in public.
To someone who’s never visited Saudi Arabia the natural inclination might be to defend the laws of the land. Maybe you could argue that he was being disrespectful to the culture. But to those of us that live here it simply spikes our anger at the glaring hypocrisy of this country, and is simply another in the innumerable examples of the endless mistreatment aimed at their army of wage slaves.
Saudi Arabia is one of the only Muslim countries on Earth where a good portion of the population can gain weight during a legally mandated month of fasting from food and liquid during the daylight hours. They don’t actually sacrifice anything in the sense of the spirit of the Koranic notion of fasting, they simply turn the night into day. At Iftar, unbelievably lavish buffets are laid out at every restaurant and hotel in the country, and people will gorge themselves until ready to burst. After the next set of prayers every restaurant, tea shop, and coffee house will remain open until two, three, or four in the morning. For most the party will go on as long as humanly possible every night so that they can sleep through most of the day and limit their fasting to the bare minimum.
Be that as it may, and now that I’ve got some of that Saudi frustration out of my system, the roads still grew incredibly dangerous as Iftar approached. Drivers aching for their food, coffee, and nicotine became more aggressive, dangerous, and erratic. The wage slaves who didn’t have the luxury of sleeping in; the taxi drivers and truck drivers, simply wearied and dulled through the course of the day.
I had made it onto the coast road that would take me all the way to my destination about 600 kilometers (360 miles) south, and slowed to avoid a ring of stopped cars. Drivers and passengers were streaming out to gawk and take pictures of an overturned Land Rover that had flipped on an embankment and landed upside down in the sand at the side of the road. A few miles later another car had drifted into the sandy median and smashed into the heavy steel pole of the highway divider.
These were but a prelude to the smash up a half hour up the road though. The road that was quickly changing colors from black to brown as tufts of sand drifted across the pavement. Though the sun was still high overhead the sky quickly grew dark, the traffic in front and behind me disappeared into the walls of dust. A sandstorm had reared its malevolent thunderhead.
Though it obscured everything, there was an almost hypnotic grace to how it filled the road. The brown wisps of sand, heavier than fog, looped and curled. Unlike smoke or fog it didn’t float over the road, it sprang from one side to the other. It was moving with that curiously lifelike purpose of a fire. In the moment, three years into my tour of the middle east, I understood why the people of the desert believed that man was fashioned from lumps of clay, and the djinn, the spirits of the desert, were wrought from flame.
Soon the slithering brown trails were joined by fresh, white bursts of fog, and rain fell in the midst of a sandstorm. The winking specks of hazard lights I followed stopped disappearing into the storm, and began coming back toward me from the left lane, passing me going in the other direction. The road ahead, a three lane highway, was completely blocked by two green trucks. As I got closer I could see the fire behind them, rising a dozen feet in the air. I turned and followed the traffic across a break in the median and into the 80 mile an hour oncoming traffic.
As we passed the wreck I saw that the green trucks were fire trucks attempting to put out the blaze caused by the collision of two tractor trailers, one of which had apparently been hauling drums of oil. The drums had scattered all over the crash site and each of them burst into flame. The cabs of the two trucks were completely black and melted into a single misshapen lump of charred steel that sunk down to about five feet in height.
I don’t know how they were doing it, but a team of firefighters, some of whose faces and bear arms were exposed, stood right in the heart of the fires spraying water from the hoses attached to the trucks.
Soon enough traffic was flowing smoothly down the street as if nothing had happened. I will say this about Saudi, it was fairly remarkable that without any authority or police presence that the traffic could so quickly adjust to a total stoppage of traffic and meander into oncoming traffic without incident. It’s hard to describe exactly how your driving style changes as you adjust to the haphazard, and, some would say, reckless, practices of the average Saudi driver. You don’t really check your mirrors anymore, you simply develop a kind of immersive awareness of where everyone else is at all times. It’s almost a subconscious twitch which keeps your eyes on all of space around the car constantly. You learn to always expect a car to come at you, at high speed, from any given direction, including from the passing lane of a one way highway. This chaos, which so many Westerners accept with a kind of hate-filled awe, in some cases is their greatest asset. This was one of those cases. If the highway is blocked, just use the highway for traffic going the opposite way, no problem. I love driving here.
After the incident the storm raged on for another half hour, with intermittent bursts of heavy rain combined with fog and sand, before it either moved on or petered out. Ahead of me was the long, boring slog through the Saudi night toward Abha, my mountainous destination.
As darkness fell the drive became much less interesting, the endless flat visages on one side, leading in some cases to distant mountains, and the invisible sea somewhere beyond the horizon on the other both disappeared. The coast road was uneventful but for the semi-constant construction projects to widen the road which led to detours for dozens of miles. It’s sad to think that with unemployment hovering around 35% for the male population that enough infrastructure projects are happening in Saudi to easily accommodate the entire non-working population. They are unwilling to perform any of those labor intensive jobs though. They are so close to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh that an army minimally paid wage slaves are always too convenient to ignore, and they come with the added benefit of a Muslim heritage, keeping the purity of Sharia intact.
It is a bizarre kind of relationship that we westerners maintain here. We are paid like kings and treated like serfs. There’s a lot involved in this relationship, much of it beyond the feeble understanding of the country I’ve scratched together in my two years here. Our expertise (I use this word to describe Engineers, Architects, and Medical Professionals, not we lowly English Teachers) is a kind of grudging necessity to the cohesion of Saudi as a modern, functioning state. Sometimes I think many of my military bosses take more solace in the fact that they can order us to work as hard as they want without bothering to consider the fact that they are completely unable to operate without us. I think this kind of tit-for-tat, “we need you but we’re still in charge” mentality is what creates such a nagging hostility in the vast majority of the expatriate community toward the country and the culture here. For we itinerant English teachers I think this is a necessary counterbalance to the reverential awe we come to expect and absolutely never deserve when we work in Asia. I’ve traded in my poverty and pride for money and shame.
As you may have surmised, those 400 miles gave me a lot of time to think, and as the car slid slowly down the map of Saudi, heading always in the direction of Yemen, I finally caught my first glimpse of a sign for Abha, my destination, after about eight hours of driving. Not long after I spotted the sign my dashboard told me that I had “low tire pressure.” This sounded like a bad thing. I pulled the car over at a gas station, almost all of which had a tire shop nearby and I got out and looked in the trunk. Remember I’d only had this car for about a day, and I had no idea what tools were available to me. In the trunk was a cloth bag with the jack and a little pouch full of tools. Thankfully, one of them was a tire pressure gauge. A cursory inspection of my tires showed them all to be identical, but I do have the unfortunate handicap of not knowing a god damn thing about how cars work.
I checked the pressure on the first two tires and the gauge jumped out to 30 psi. The third jumped to about a millimeter under that, I could only guess that it was at 27 or 28 psi at the least. The fourth was a solid 30 as well. None of this seemed like a problem to me. My car was just whining about nothing. In the next in a long line of terrible life decisions, I ignored my dashboard and moved on. Soon enough the highway narrowed and started going straight up into the mountains. I was taking it easy, moving to the side to let a series of cars and trucks pass. I was elated, it was about midnight, nine hours after I’d left the base, and I was finally within 40 kilometers of Abha, the breezy mountain stronghold where Arabs from all over the Arabian Peninsula came to cool off in the summer months.
We all know what happens next, that sound that always manages to rise above your blasting music, thub thub thub thub thub thub thub thub. That 27 PSI had dropped down to zero. I blew out a tire. I’d been up since 7:30 that morning, I was exhausted, on the middle of an unlit road on a 30 degree incline with a very small shoulder, and I still had no idea where I was going to sleep that night. In the distance I saw the tell-tale lights of a gas station, so I did what I’m pretty sure you’re never supposed to do, I kept driving on my flat tire for about a mile. I pulled across the road into the gas station and turned off the car, cursing my fate, but knowing that a flat tire was a small price to pay for the endless strings of blasphemy that spewed out of my mouth on a daily basis. You can’t expect too much when you live in Saudi Arabia and read the entire Koran out of spite.
I walked over to the tire place next to the gas station and explained my situation in perfect Arabic to the gentlemen sitting on a dilapidated couch next to a stack of tires.
Me: I…this (pointing to a nearby tire) finished. Ineednewthis.
He smiled at me like all fathers smile at the special children of other parents. He asked me where my car was and I pointed across the tarmac. He then gave me a kind of smiling wave that said, “well bring it over here you hairy, white dumb ass.” I liked him immediately.
I brought the car over and he called over an assistant. Within 30 seconds he’d found the leak, jacked up the car and used one of those compressed-air powered, pneumatic whirlimagigs to take off the tire. He walked over to a shelf and grabbed a bunch of pink, stringy looking things and drove them into a hole the size of my thumbnail with a metal spike. He put the tire back on and pumped it back up in a matter of five minutes. The tire was removed, fixed, and replaced in a few minutes for a cost of two dollars and sixty-six cents. In my ignorance I had asked him for a new tire. In America he would have quickly calculated that I was a moron and told me I needed four. The man, Abu Ziyad (father of Ziyad) many, many Arab men will use the honoric “father of the name of their first born son” in place of their first name)) was Yemeni. From my illiterate smattering of awful Arabic he had guessed I was Turkish. I would be mistaken three times for a Turk, and twice for a Syrian in the two days I was in Abha. I assume this was more due to the fact that they don’t get too many Americans down there than that I was an even a remotely passable Arab or Turk. But if there’s a desperate spy agency out there that wants to pay me a boat load of money to wander around you have but to ask, my moral fiber is of surprisingly similar texture and thickness to a hundred dollar bill.
When the car had been fixed I had to concentrate on the thought of wandering around Abha without any map or guidance and finding a room in a hotel somewhere, during one of the busiest times of the year for the city. I wanted to put it off for a time so I collapsed on the couch next to Abu Ziyad and had a broken conversation about Yemen. We sat and smoked each other’s cigarettes while a few Bedouin showed up in their Toyota Datsuns and stayed a few minutes to gape at the random white dude. I was still feeling a kind of high from escaping the flat tire predicament so cheaply and easily. It was either a very good omen or a sign that something disastrous was about to happen, and I was too tired to deal very adequately with either.
I whirled into the periphery of Abha, passing a dizzying array of brightly painted buildings that looked like vacation retreats. It was Ramadan, and the parties were pressing all around me. The city itself was jam packed, and I drove around trying to find a way to get uphill to the monstrous hotel I saw at the top of a mountain on the outskirts of town. Eventually I came to a junction that would have taken me out of town completely or to some random sub-district. I chose the latter. One of the calm masteries I’ve discovered in being perpetually lost everywhere I go is the propensity to drive in straight lines for as long as possible. It makes it easier to retrace your steps, and helps with memorizing landmarks. In such a way did I discover the large out of the way hotel I would stay in, and manage without any kind of map or guidance to find my way back to it without issue for the rest of the weekend. It was sometime after one in the morning when I strolled into some innocuous Abha hotel and found the smiling Egyptian concierge with a thankfully masterful command of English.
He had one room left, and gave it to me for about 60 bucks a night, the one caveat was that I not reveal to any other guests of the hotel that I was staying in it alone. It seemed like a bizarre request until I saw the room. I had a master bedroom with a king size bed, a second bedroom with three twins, a full kitchen, a living room, and two full bathrooms to myself. It was a welcome second stroke of good luck. I was starving and I scrapped up a couple of egg sandwiches for about 30 cents a piece from a little restaurant next to the hotel run by a pair of Indian brothers. At about 2:30 sleep came instantly.
The next day I managed to get out of the room by 11. I checked out, relying on the fact that my students told me that there’d be plenty of people camping out around Al-Souda, the largest mountain and central tourist draw of the city. Since that was the only thing I’d seen a sign for in town, and the new concierge didn’t speak a lick of English, I headed that way. The road was completely empty. It seemed like even the birds were sleeping-in during Ramadan. As I drove up toward the summit of Al-Souda bursts of fog and rain came and went. The air was cool, and refreshing, and the rain was exhilarating. It has not rained in Jeddah for the last 19 months. I passed the entrance for the Intercontinental Hotel, which I had banked on being able to provide me with some maps and guidance when I got to the city, and continued toward the top of the mountain. I drove for another 30 minutes at slow speeds, completely enveloped in fog and rain. I couldn’t see more than twenty feet in front of the car, and there could have been sheer cliffs or a party at the playboy mansion at either side of me, but I couldn’t see anything. Eventually I started going back downhill again, and I stopped at a gas station to ask where the mountain was. He pointed directly behind me at the wall of fog I’d just come through.
It seemed Al-Souda was not to be, but I promised my students I’d bring them back pictures. I drove up to the summit and pulled aside in a parking lot overlook. A family of wild baboons scampered over the wall and back down the mountain as I approached. Many of the mountains in central Saudi are absolutely crawling with baboons. Tourists feed them huge quantities of food, and leave heart wrenching piles of plastic debris in their wake. In the end the animals are often left crawling over miniature landfills to fight over the scraps of food tossed from parked cars. I stood at the retaining wall, staring at a half dozen baboons huddling ten feet beneath me, and took a picture of the wall of fog to show my students.
With the prospect of every worthwhile site being enveloped in the same fog I was feeling a little more rudderless than usual, no easy feat, so I drove to the Intercontinental to get my bearings back. I drove in through the open gate, past an empty guard shack. When I pulled into the parking lot in front of a pair of gorgeous wooden doors I was the only car in the massive parking lot. This was not a good sign. The huge sprawling complex was as silent as a tomb, the magisterial, five star edifice, topped with a massive golden dome, was riddled with broken windows. The parking lot through the partying of teenagers or simply the mountain winds had accumulated piles of garbage like snowdrifts. The most expensive hotel in Abha, which had dozens of reviews in western websites, and updated prices for this year, looked like it had been abandoned for years. As I left I noticed that the road leading to the gate was streaked with the burnt rubber circles of donuts.
It was early afternoon at this point, and the entire country would be locked up for another six hours at least. I had heard about a really cool museum in Khamis Machette, a nearby city, and with no prospects for seeing anything that day in Abha I headed that way. I reached the city without incident, and seeing as the museum had been such a tourist fixture for at least twenty or thirty years I was hoping there would be some kind of sign, or at the least a large enough hotel where I might get directions. These hopes dwindled quickly after I arrived in the city. I may have been slightly overconfident in my abilities when I left on this trip, and began cursing the fact that I hadn’t even brought an Arabic dictionary along for the ride. I had no idea what the word for museum was. After wandering around the streets and highways of Khamis Machette for awhile, failing to locate a single hotel or landmark worth investigating, and with almost all of the city shutdown for the daylight hours of Ramadan, I sent out a text to a coworker in Jeddah who’d visited the Museum before. He did a quick internet search and gave me directions, the museum was outside of the city on the Riyadh bound highway, but after a half hour of driving and three separate gas station attendants telling me they’d never heard of the thing that was supposedly a few miles away, I gave up. It was five or six o’clock when I got back to Abha, having seen nothing, with no prospect for camping out, and still a few hours until any restaurants in the city opened up. I went back to the hotel and got my old, massive room again. I hunkered down and took a nap. Seven hours of wandering and driving and all I had to show for it was a picture of fog.
I woke up about a half hour after Iftar and got in the car and drove to a big Lebanese restaurant I’d seen on the way in. As soon as I parked the car, the minarets erupted around me. It was prayer time, and I’d have to wait thirty minutes until the restaurant opened back up. I sat in the car with a legal pad, taking down copious notes which have led directly to the ungodly detail and length of what is so far a pretty boring story.
A half hour later the restaurant was still closed. I got out of the car and saw that everything was still closed. The barber shops, restaurants, pharmacies, the whole shebang. I got back into the car, turned on the a/c and let music flow over me as I recounted the drive there. After an hour, everything was still closed. I hadn’t had a meal in ten hours. I was sandy. After an hour and fifteen minutes I gave up and drove the few minutes back to the hotel. When I asked in my eloquent Arabic, “prayerfinishwhen?” they laughed at me and said ten o’clock. I had not encountered this before, after the half hour afforded to break the fast they closed everything back up again for two and a half hours.
When ten o’clock came I put on some headphones and took off for the restaurant on foot. It was thankfully open when I got there, and after staring at the pictures of Lebanese spreads on the façade for almost two hours I was practically drooling. I grabbed a menu and started gesturing and nearly everything. The two men behind the counter looked at me with what seemed thinly veiled contempt and then one of them stabbed his finger down on the most lackluster picture of a chicken with French fries I’d seen in a while. Halas. That was it. They were serving one crappy meal out of the entire pantheon of tantalizing Lebanese/Mediterranean cuisine. I had moved beyond sandy into homicidal rage, and meeting the sneer in his face I crumpled up the menu and threw it on the floor as I walked out of the restaurant.
I got some fried samosas and salad and a grilled chicken at the little restaurant across the street from the hotel, and went inside and inhaled it. Finally sated, and happy that Ahmed, my English speaking Egyptian concierge was back, I went to the front desk to come to some plan of action for tomorrow. Ahmed suggested a guide. He called Abu Sarah, a Yemeni born taxi driver cum English speaking guide to Abha.
Abu Sarah came to the hotel to pick me up at eight in the morning. He claimed to have not yet gone to sleep. I immediately liked the fact that he referred to himself as the father of a girl (Abu Sarah, father of Sarah). This is exceedingly rare, at least in my experience in Saudi. I read an article a few years back that focused on the kind of bizarre experience of Afghan girls who lived most of their childhood as boys. In Afghanistan, men who hadn’t fathered any sons would allow one of their girls to pretend to be a boy until they reached puberty. To me Abu Sarah held at least one admirable quality before he opened his mouth.
He asked where I wanted to go, and I showed him the nine or so things written in English and Arabic in my little notebook. He almost shuddered, but I told him anything was better than nothing, it didn’t matter how many of them I saw. We started back up toward the foggy peak of Al-Souda. We got there quickly and the fog had descended again. At the very least he took me to the spot where a great horde of baboons gathered. He threw some rotten looking old pomegranates out and they leaped with a few feet of us to pick them up and scamper away. I’d seen plenty of baboons already in Saudi, but lacking anything better to do I took some pictures.
Abu Sarah spent some minutes remarking on how intelligent they were as one of them seemed to be staring at us while masturbating. He said some weeks before he saw a kid throw a water bottle at the horde and one of the baboons picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and downed all the water before throwing it back. God help us when they figure out how to use Google. I’m sure within a week or two the comments on youtube videos from the baboon community would be virtually indistinguishable from those of our enlightened teenagers.
Despite the prodigious numbers of baboons there was nothing else to see on Al-Souda, though my guide was surprised that the massive five-star hotel on the top of the mountain was abandoned. He had no idea it was no longer running. He said it seemed to him like the only explanation was that someone had run afoul of a prince somehow or other.
After Al-Souda we went to a place called Al-Habala (the rope). It was immediately apparent that there was no way I ever would have found this place without a guide. After turning on a few non-descript roads and burning across 30 or 40 miles of rocky emptiness we came to a large sign in Arabic that announced we’d arrived at our destination. The next obstacle was a closed gate. The place was empty, no guards, no employees…nothing. We got out and uncoiled the rope that held the gate down and let ourselves in. There was an amusement-park-looking facility, surrounded by a steel fence, which looked so much like the traveling carnival at a redneck county fair that I thanked a number of Gods I don’t believe in that it was closed.
To get a better view we scrambled around the fence, and over to the edge of the cliff. Habala was actually a fairly enchanting little tourist spot. At one time there was a functioning village at the bottom of this sheer cliff. The community used the plateau hundreds of feet above them to provide the food in the somewhat verdant uplands. Now the village has been demolished and the concrete structure below has become some kind of quasi-museum. For now though, it was closed, and from our vantage point we could see baboons streaking across the gray floors, hooting and screaming their echoes along the valley below. It was strangely reminiscent of one of the calm scenes from the movie Congo, right before the primates began killing everything.
My students were saying something about people “jumping” from Habala, but they never really quite got it across. Abu Sarah explained it to me, and as it turns out, westerners had been using the cliff for base jumping in recent years.
From Habala we drove out to a place called Gara’a (ga rah ah). Abu Sarah explained that the bizarre rock formations there were some of the best in the country and he took almost everyone foreigner here…until about a year ago, when they decided to bulldoze all of the formations to make room for a university. We had passed by about thirty miles of completely flat and empty space from Habala to the remnants of Gara’a, yet they chose to bulldoze a geological phenomenon, rather than move the school another mile or two out in the nothingness. Once you’ve decided to bulldoze a good part of Mecca for a five star hotel with a phallic clock tower though, there’s not much left that’s sacred.
After a cursory drive through the park near Gara’a we went back to Abha. Abu Sarah had to pray. I told him I had no problem waiting, so he took me up to a place called Jebel Akdar (the green mountain) which was a combination of a small hill in the center of Abha covered in trees and shrubs, and five concentric rings of green neon lights. At night it was green on green in the center of town. Most elements of Abha’s tourism had a substantial amount of cheese built in. I waited for about an hour in the parking lot, my legs dangling over a concrete embankment above the city. The place was closed down so I drank a soda and ate a granola bar in flagrant and joyous violation of the fast.
When he picked me up again we looked at my list of places to see. The telefrique (cable cars) were nice and modern, but I had always believed the purpose of a cable car was to take you to a view that was hard if not almost impossible to reach otherwise. In Abha one drove to the top, where the cable car started and then descended into what you could already see. A few of the other mountains were likely to be as clouded up as Al-Souda, and the other places Abu Sarah told me were, “nothing.” “Your students are Bedouin, they don’t anything,” was his explanation. It had also come to Abu Sarah’s attention that he had forgotten he promised another set of tourists he would take them to the airport five minutes ago.
He drove me back to my hotel where all of my belongings were already packed in my car. I paid him an exorbitant $125 for his troubles. We had not agreed to any price before I left with him. I think I was more curious what he would charge than worried about getting gouged. It is bizarre to me that so many of the people I met, like Abu Ziyad who fixed my tire, inspired such total trust in me, and yet the man who I could communicate with seemed so much less trustworthy. This pattern has repeated itself countless times, the guys who speak the best English are to be watched and assessed. Something about Abu Sarah unnerved me a bit, and it finally came to a head when he spit out his price for his services. He’d spent a long time around tourists, and he knew what they could pay. He did however, single handedly save my trip and show me some things I never would have found otherwise. He let me follow him through town to the exit that would take me back to Jeddah, and I shook his hand and promised to call him if I visited again, knowing full well that there weren’t too many forces in the world that could drag me back to a half-assed tourist town in the center of Saudi Arabia.
I try to think of some life lesson that this experience could impart to you. But I think the most important reason that I’ve relayed this story is so that a few years, or many years from now, when one of your children look up into your eyes and innocently ask, “Daddy, what did idiots do before they had GPS chips in their heads?” At that moment, you can double click your left temple, and press your index finger onto your child’s forehead, and say, “This, sweetheart, this is how idiots lived their entire lives before any of us knew what we were doing.”
