I have begun to slowly venture out in the car. We made a trip to our farmer's market and grocery store and yesterday I took our friend Aleen to a frame shop and another grocery store. It was nice since it was kind of rainy and I got a chance to check out the new GPS.
After returning home, we got a call from Camille asking us to pick her up from a friends house. It was getting dark and she was somewhere way out on the outskirts of town. I tried to plug in the address in the GPS but was not able to get a map course. So I printed out instructions off of Map Quest. It looked fairly direct and I had been on most of the roads before so I had some reassurance that I could follow it at least out to the general area where she was. So I drove off!
One of the many problems of driving in Moscow is that there is usually a lot of traffic. The other problem is that the streets are not well marked and in the dark, it is near impossible to see their names even if you know where to look. It took about an hour crawling through heavy traffic to get onto the main thoroughfare. Then all of a sudden, everyone was going about 80 miles an hour, straddling lanes, cutting in and out between cars, and slamming on their brakes to avoid hitting slower cars. The four lanes were not well marked. I was in the 3rd lane from the right and knew I had about 12 kilometers to drive before I needed to turn off. Suddenly the two left hand lanes separated and the two lanes on the right veered off. I entered a tunnel and was wondering if I was still on the road I needed to be on or not. It was about another 3 kilometers before I could pull off.
Lost, I was trying to decide if I should turn around and reverse my steps up to the point of highway separation, knowing well that to do so was quite problematic. Plus, I couldn't just pull a U turn and left turns are not legal unless there is a green arrow allowing you to do so. I pulled over near an apartment building and suddenly saw that the road I was on was the road I needed to turn off on to but I had no sense of where on that road in relation to the exit I was at. Camille called and I spoke to a Grandmother who told me to look for a "Seventh Continent" grocery store landmark. I drove about 10 minutes and traffic was starting to get heavy again with road construction and an accident. I stopped to ask a passerby who told me there was such a grocery store another 2 kilometers up the road. I kept driving and never saw it.
Suddenly again the road split and I found myself on an on-ramp onto another freeway. I stopped as soon as I could and asked directions back to the road I was on. It was complicated but eventually I succeeded and with the help of Camille's friend's father, he navigated me by phone to their house! At one point he told me to hang up for 2 minutes because I was about to drive past a police station and if they saw me on the phone, they would pull me over and not release me without a bribe. It took a little over 2 hours to find her.
Camille and I followed the Map Quest instructions most of the way home. It went pretty smoothly until we got to the center of Moscow where we were looking for the #1 Tushinsky exit. I saw the #3, then #2, but no #1! The exits were practically on top of one another at this point. I had no idea where to go. Suddenly Camille shouted, "Pop! I know where we are!" She recognized some landmarks from the route her bus takes home from school. She guided me into the thick of central Moscow and got me onto the Flower Ring Road that our embassy is on. Elated, we felt as though we had beaten the odds and found our way home just like a cat that can be taken miles away and comes back the very next day - just like in the song.