Back in 2014, I returned to San Diego for a high school reunion. I did not yet have any mobile device, but my parents loaned me a car and their feature phone for my use while I was home.

Now a few of my friends arranged an informal meetup which I jokingly called “The Honors Reunion” and they chose a brew pub on Coronado Island. I know many San Diego neighborhoods like the back of my hand, but Coronado was a place where I only drove to the beach, not needing any map or navigation, because it is hard to miss the Pacific Ocean segment between a Naval Air Station and the Hotel Del.

Anyways, I asked Mapquest how to find this brew pub, and I made a printout. This should have sufficed: Coronado is really, really small.

But the pin on the map led me to a darkened, mostly residential side street. I parked, walked around, scratched my head, and concluded that the map was wrong.

So rather than try asking for directions or calling my parents, I am a man after all: I drove up and down every street, crisscrossing the business district, basically brute-forcing the map until I finally stumbled on the location itself.

My friends were all there, happy to see me again, and we had a great chat before the big reunion activities began.

Arriving back home, I managed to piece together what happened, and apparently I had just made an extra misclick on the map surface just as I printed it out, sending the pin into no-man's-land.

That is probably the last time I got thoroughly and accidentally lost.