San Quentin Prison Blues

Heard the one about the Sat Nav (GPS), the tourists and the State correctional facility? 

We’d just visited Tiburon, just outside of San Francisco and decided to move on to see Berkeley, but first wanted to find a place just to grab a light lunch – somewhere like a Starbucks.  Heading north on the 101 we came across signs for a shopping centre, so we turned off. There were loads of road works and no Starbucks, in fact nothing that tempted us at all, so we asked Helga the Sat Nav for directions to San Rafael, which should, we thought, get us back onto the main road north.  

The route seemed very convoluted compared to the way we had just travelled to get here but, hey, Helga knows best.  …Doesn’t she? 

‘In 100 yards, turn left.  Turn left’ she commanded.

We dutifully followed … er… to find that we were at the gates of San Quentin prison.  I’m assuming that we were under surveillance at this point and what the guards must have seen was perhaps an unusual sight in their otherwise mundane day - there we were, a middle-aged couple, apparently corpsing ourselves with mirth.  Much hilarity ensued until we were composed enough to reverse back and away from the prison gates and we re-calibrated Helga to show us the way to San Rafael.  Off we went.  

We turned, we drove, and we turned, all the time very carefully following Helga’s instructions … and hello  ….we were back at San Quentin again! 

In fact Helga was so determined that we should visit San Quentin that this journey was repeated a total of three times, by which time we decided that the joke was starting to wear a little thin.  Helga was shut down and we fell back on instinct and common sense to get us out and away from the San Quentin Circle of Doom. 

Now … Annelise at Box of Crayons recently mentioned that when she sees, on TV, somewhere that she has been, she has a tendency to blurt out: ‘I’ve been there!’  I confessed that I do that too, except that I try not to annoy others by doing it in public, for fear of getting my lights punched out.  (Nobody likes a bragger).

Well the other night we were watching CSI and the plot involved a visit to San Quentin prison.  No prizes for guessing, therefore, that I joyously shouted out: 

‘I’ve been there!‘  

To which my husband quickly responded: 

‘Yeah, me too!  Three times.’ 

Holidays …  the stuff of many a happy memories!  

~ The Road to Berkeley ~