Thanks BTD, I will have to change our service to that!!

And I'm the opposite, rather good at knowing where I'm facing on the compass, but useless with revisiting places until the 5th time driving there.

I'm clueless about points on the compass, I'm all about landmarks.

As a further derail - in college I noticed that in California we tell distance in terms of time instead of miles. I have no clue how many mile it is to San Diego, or Disneyland, but I know how long it should take me to get there. Not so with my East Coast friends.

I'm one that can drive anywhere. I have a great sense of direction if I'm the one driving. However, distance means NOTHING to me.

That's because miles are meaningless. Two different destinations can be an equal # of miles apart, and yet take a drastically different amount of time to get to, depending on traffic patterns.

And yet, my experience with most Southern Californians is that while they give distances in time they are almost always horribly wrong about how much time it will take.

I remember a comic I saw on TV when I was a kid who had a joke about how in LA everything is "about 20 minutes away" from wherever you happen to be. I didn't really get it until I began interacting with a lot of people frmo there. That's an exaggeration but sometimes not by much. I'm sure plenty of people really do know the accurate times but a lot don't.

Yeah, we're part of the few that do. We are continually "early" to everything. "Early" meaning exactly on time while everyone else is consistently late.

I've always wondered if the times people give for distances were culturally set in the '50s and '60s when most of the good highways had been built but hadn't yet been filled with cars. Sure, Valencia is 40 minutes from Anaheim as I've been told...at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Of course, one time while staying in a Hollywood area motel I asked the desk clerk how long it would talk to walk to some restaurant. She literally said "about 20 minutes" and it was really almost an hour-long walk. That's the experience that reminded me of that comic I saw on TV as a child.

Once, when I was back East (Connecticut) for work, some people were giving me a hard time for how fast people drive in Southern California, I let them know that we do that because of all of the traffic that we are usually stuck in: in the end, it all averages out.