Even My Navigator Had Trouble Setting A Course To Hopkins-Carter Marine

Hopkins-Carter Marine is located in an old section of Miami by the Miami River, the streets go every which way, and they play second fiddle to the needs of river traffic, ship yards, railroad tracks, and acres of freight containers waiting to be loaded on a truck, ship, or railway car. A few weeks before I'd gotten thouroughly lost trying to get there!

This time I tried doing the 21st century thing and went to Mapquest on the computer. Just shy of zooming in tight enough to be useful Mapquest went on strike and gave me an error message. For REAL. I kept trying and finally decided that we'd have to tough it out, depend on dead reckoning, and push come to shove we could always call Parks on the cell phone. I sketched out a rough map of the area showing the river and a few main streets, featuring the street address in big letters. Monkette put it on her lap and off we went! We were supposed to meet Parks at one for lunch.

Soon we were thoroughly lost, but at least this trip we kept seeing familiar sights that we remembered from last time, not that it did us any good. As we circled around over the same bridge for the third time I glanced at the time. 12:51 it said. Monkette said "Call Parks!". Smart monkey. He asked where we were and I described what I saw. "Take the next right, go one block and go left, and three or four buildings down is where we are." He was right! We pulled into the parking lot, went up the stairs, and still had three minutes to spare.