You're listening to Outside In, I'm Nate Hedgy. The year was 2007, and Christina Phillips was on a road trip with her mom.

They were checking out colleges around Washington, D.C. driving a rental car.

It was a Volkswagen bug, then it was lime green.

Christina, by the way, is a senior producer for our sister podcast, Civics 101.

And this was before smartphones were really

popular. So Christina's mom was using a portable GPS device. We were relying

entirely on this GPS because neither of us really knew how to read maps. I learned later like I'm never

going to survive in an apocalypse if I can't read a map well. So they plug in the address and start

following the directions to another school a few hours outside the city.

She's like entranced by the GPS and I keep being like mom you have to look at the road

like she's following the GPS instead of the road because she's just like my car is moving on this map.

And we go under a bridge and the GPS goes recalculating, turn left, and my mom like puts her left blinker on as we're in a tunnel.

And I was like, you cannot turn left.

We are in a tunnel.

And she was like, oh, oh whoops I was watching the

GPS again.

Eventually we get out of DC and we're driving through the countryside and the GPS just randomly as we're on the like a

country highway goes take the exit so we're like okay we'll take the exit we have no idea where we are we take the exit and the

GPS puts us on a dirt road that is parallel to the highway I'm like mom I think we

can just get back on the highway and she's like no no no if we get off this road I'll never find our way back

So she insisted on driving we were driving like through little towns on this dirt road like over train tracks in this tiny like

VW bug and it's just like her driving looking to the left to look at the

...