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This weekend I spent another Saturday attending weddings. Yep, you read that right...plural...weddings. One at 10am and one at 6:30pm. The wedding at 10am was in a small town outside of Louisville called Lancaster. It's about an hour and half from here, this side of Lexington. Well, I headed off early Saturday morning (early for a Saturday at 8:15am) with two wonderful men to experience our latest nuptials. Note: It's always more enjoyable to have a man (or men) accompany you to a wedding - eases the difficulty of going.

I had printed off directions from my favorite online mapping site, Rand McNally. I've gotten ribbed about the driving directions from this site because of their elaborate descriptions, "You will see a sign that says...". But for the directionally challenged as myself, that's very helpful. So, my navigator took the directions, my back seat driver was in place, and off we went. Aside from a weird "You will enter the Rotary" directional guide, the instructions were flawless. And, we made it there just in time for the wedding.

At the reception, some of the participants in the wedding party asked how long it took us to get there. We told them about an hour and a half. They were shocked. Their drives the day before were closer to two and a half hours. The reason? They used directions from the wedding party, which brought them the long way around, instead of a direct shot from Louisville. We were pretty proud of our resourcefulness and admitted that even if we had gotten directions, we still would have printed them off of an internet resource.

So, that begged the driving topic - What did we do before online mapping? When I was a kid, Dad would visit the local AAA office and request a "Triptik" for our travels. That flipcharted map outlined our trek with a green marker, noting any construction or detours along the way. I always got excited when we were on the last couple of flip pages because that meant we were close! My how times have changed. I can now go online and print directions to anywhere in the world right from my home computer.

After our jaunt on Saturday, our wedding team decided that we needed to develop this online mapping a bit further and come up with a landmark mapping system that noted all the important landmarks as you drive to your destination - "Turn right on Elm Street (you'll see a McDonald's on your left and the County Bank on your right)" Now that's technology.