There’s an old idiom that getting there is half the fun, meaning the process of getting to the end of something is just as rewarding as arriving at your destination. It’s something that carries a certain significance to everyone, but I think it’s become especially poignant after a recent weekend with my sweetheart.

We finally got a weekend off together after three months and it happened to coincide with a night out at the theater. There’s a community theater group in Abrams, about a 40-minute drive from where I live, and they were performing a comedy called “Boeing Boeing” involving a man engaged to
three different flight attendants from three different airlines and three different countries.

Ironically, Todd bought season tickets not knowing if we were going to be able to take the specific dates off. This time, we got lucky, so spending Saturday night watching a relationship juggling act of epic proportions was essential—as was grabbing a bite to eat.

Our plans were to eat in Bonduel, as we have two restaurants we like to patronize. We thought first of going to the Lumberyard, seeing as we hadn’t been there for a while due to their Friday night fish fries being so popular that if you didn’t get there before four o’clock, you were waiting a while for a table.

That prompted us instead to go to The Hungry Bear, but it turned out that they didn’t open for dinner on Saturday nights. They close at 4 p.m., and we got there after 5, anticipating we could be finished eating at 6 and get to the theater in plenty of time for the curtain to rise at 7. Now, we were trying to figure out what to do for dinner and still get to the theater before we missed any laughs.

That’s when we decided to see what was in Abrams, since that was in our destination, and Todd found a place called Glover’s Bar and Grill. Todd looked for directions into his phone, and I figured my usual route to Abrams was going to be the chosen drive.

Sometimes I’m wrong. That was one of those times.

Just as I was crossing the bridge for the Mountain Bay Trail, the digital diva ordered a turn to the right, even though my usual route to Abrams usually dictated I didn’t turn right for another three or four miles. I figured I would eventually get onto the county road I usually drove and that this would eventually lead to the usual route.

It didn’t. Every couple of miles, I was making a turn right or left on some unknown road. The county roads and even the state highway I usually intersected with on my standard route were passed without the cellular backseat driver telling me to make a turn. I was beginning to wonder if we were going to have time for dinner before the show.

To make matters even more interesting, I glanced to the north and saw that dark clouds were building. All day, we’d been dodging minor rain showers, but the clouds I was seeing looked dark enough to provide a torrential downpour. The latest question popping in my head was whether or not we’d be flipping on the windshield wipers and headlamps before we reached Glover’s.

As it turned out, that was not the case. After about 40 minutes of left turns and right turns on roads unbeknownst to me before, we finally arrived at our destination, and I recognized the part of Abrams we were in, and we were less than a quarter-mile from the theater that was previously a little country church. That gave us ample time to eat dinner and get to the theater.

Now the question was whether the meal would be good, seeing as we’d never been to the restaurant before. That also came to a good conclusion, and we made it to the theater with about 20 minutes to spare, and the show was excellent. Even though we didn’t know where we were going, we got there in one piece, and we got to see some new scenery to boot.

I’ve heard of horror stories about cell phone map apps that delivered people to dead ends or into hazardous places. Just that morning, I’d used it to take a different route to a farm store I’d discovered recently, and the impatient princess giving me directions insisted I still had a half-mile to go and should “proceed to the route” even though I was pulling into the driveway for the place. In other words, Miss Thang on the phone is not always right.

Sometimes she’s right on the money, though, and the sojourn on the back roads to get to the theater showed that getting there really can be half the fun.