Have you ever made a mistake as big as this chinese cyclist?

[mercalia]

"Chinese man cycles 500km in wrong direction to get home"

poor man - the smog must have got to his brain? 30 days to go wrong is..........

I wonder what the man's thoughts were when he was told....

very hard to understand the mentality?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-38748373

[Paulatic]

I haven't but a number of years ago 2 distressed ladies arrived in my local one evening looking for B&B. Earlier they had left Blackpool to head home to Manchester.
My local is 130 miles north of from Blackpool. Beggars belief you can pass all those place names ( Preston, Kendal, Carlisle, Gretna) and not realise you are going in the wrong direction.

[Cyril Haearn]

I haven't but a number of years ago 2 distressed ladies arrived in my local one evening looking for B&B. Earlier they had left Blackpool to head home to Manchester.
My local is 130 miles north of from Blackpool. Beggars belief you can pass all those place names ( Preston, Kendal, Carlisle, Gretna) and not realise you are going in the wrong direction.

As cyclists we think very geographically.

Many other people do not. With satan-nav it has got much worse.

Stoney Middleton or Middleton Stoney? My favourite pair, they are far apart

[Elizabethsdad]

Many years ago I was going to Newcastle upon Tyne by coach and missed it because I was waiting at the wrong coach stop - Newcastle under Lyme.

[Vorpal]

I normally have a very good sense of direction and distance. Even if I don't know the right road to use, I can usually tell if I am generally going the right way, and approximately how far I have gone. My cousins and I used to play a game where we spun round and round and tried to find a cardinal direction when we stopped. I was good at that game, to the point that even older cousins quite playing it with me.

But... there are a few places I've been that mess with my sense of direction. Mountains are more likely to affect it; I guess because some of the direction cues, like lighting are less helpful. One place where I am especially bad at direction is a town where I lived until I was 6 or 7. I somehow got the north swapped for south and east for west there when I was small, and I have never been able to overcome that. I lived there for some months as an adult, and I was forever going the wrong way or getting lost. It was extremely frustrating and disorienting. Even when I used a compass and map, my brain was telling me that I needed to go the other way.

I've never gone more than a few hours in the wrong direction, though I did get lost once on a 'one mile' walk in the Blue Ridge mountains in North Carolina. I was trying to follow a walking path to some waterfalls. There was touristy wooden map up in the car park & looked easy I could hear the waterfalls, but the path that looked like the obvious one wasn't. I realised after I'd been walking for 30 minutes & the waterfall wasn't getting any closer sounding that I must have taken the wrong path. When I tried to retrace my steps, I must have taken another wrong path, because I found the river, but not where I crossed it before. I walked along the river for a bit, first in one direction, and then another thinking I would either find my previous crossing, or the waterfalls, but I must have found another river because I didn't find either. I did find some blueberries, so I had a snack Then I walked up the hill to find a vantage point, so I could see where I was. I found it, and headed back to the road, only I came across a section where there had been a landslide that I couldn't safely cross. So I went back up the hill to find another route. It was starting to get dark then, and I was considering making myself some sort of shelter for the night while I still had the light to do it & finding my way out in the morning. Luckily, I came across some long distance walkers who had a map & showed me where I was & how to bypass the washed out section. From there, it took me about an hour to get back to the road & my rental car. All for a badly mapped one-mile tourist walk to some waterfalls that I never actually got to see.

[kwackers]

I haven't but a number of years ago 2 distressed ladies arrived in my local one evening looking for B&B. Earlier they had left Blackpool to head home to Manchester.
My local is 130 miles north of from Blackpool. Beggars belief you can pass all those place names ( Preston, Kendal, Carlisle, Gretna) and not realise you are going in the wrong direction.

For a second I thought that was someone I knew, but they left Liverpool to go to Devon and were alerted by the "Welcome to Scotland" boarding.

[Postboxer]

When buying something that was collection only from ebay, my brother once mixed up Ruswarp, North Yorkshire, near Whitby, an hour away from him, with Ruislip, West London, 4 hours away, which cost him 6 hours of his life he won't get back.

[Graham]

Back in the 80s.
Student ski trip by coach to Austria.

The coach driver drove off the ferry at Calais and within half an hour was following road signs back to Calais.

Later in the journey he needed to exit the autoroute at Hagenau ( to avoid paying tolls, probably ). This was a critical point of exit.
He missed it, took the next one and spent several hours driving the coach through the narrow lanes in remote agricultural lowlands of the Rhine.
There was much backing-up and three-point-turns as the tarmac ran out or ended in some farmyard.

It was a cheap trip. Pay peanuts : Get . . . . . . !

[thirdcrank]

... in the Blue Ridge mountains in North Carolina. ....

Aren't the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia?

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=on ... &FORM=VIRE

[Vorpal]

... in the Blue Ridge mountains in North Carolina. ....

Aren't the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia?

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=on ... &FORM=VIRE

yes (but my mistake wasn't *that* big )

[Elizabethsdad]

North Carolina reminds of when we went there on holiday once. Picked up hire care from Rayleigh Durham airport to drive out to Kill Devil Hills on the coast. Got a bit lost trying to get on the right road out of the city and it took a couple of goes to get the hang of cloverleaf junctions. Navigation is always harder when you are driving on the wrong side of the road trying to avoid collisions in busy traffic. Ended stopping at a diner to get directions from a friendly helpful policeman who was on his break.

[TrevA]

Some people have absolutely no clue about geography. I can get in a car and go virtually anywhere in the country without having to consult a map. My wife thinks this is some sort of black magic and would need the SatNav to get her to the next large town.

I remember Jade Goody on a TV programme, she said "I know Cambridge is in London, but I'm not sure about Birmingham" !

[661-Pete]

I think I may have already told the story about the elderly couple in the car, who, having fruitlessly consulted their Satnav, stopped me to ask the way to Hurstpierpoint College.

It happened just about here.

[Cyril Haearn]

Many years ago I was going to Newcastle upon Tyne by coach and missed it because I was waiting at the wrong coach stop - Newcastle under Lyme.

Could have been worse if you wanted to go to Keele and found yourself in Kiel on the Baltic Sea. Sounds just the same, has a Uni too

[bikepacker]

One year I arranged to meet a cycling friend at the Mildenhall Cycle Rally. He didn't turn up because he went to a Mildenhall near Marlborough and spent two days looking for the rally.