Meet my new best friend

I have a new best friend. Her name is Samantha. Samantha was a huge help this week in getting me to and from work in record time!

Woohoooo!  Samantha is the voice navigation in the Waze traffic app I downloaded to my phone. She's the bomb. Really.  The first week or so I wasn't so sure.  GPS navigation has always been wrong for driving to our house. We always warn people that are driving to our house for the first time to not use their GPS map. For some really strange reason it actually takes a person out of the way past the street into our private road neighborhood and tries to bring you in the back side...through a dirt road that is blocked to even get through! It's been like this for years and apparently still the main way for directions to our house. 

But, Waze assured me that after several trips via my route to my house (basically the last mile or so), it would remember that as a preferred route and sure enough it did.  Last week I still wasn't trusting Samantha to get me home or to work the quickest route. I'd drive past her suggestion, thinking I knew better.  Tuesday I finally trusted her and decided to follow her route all the way home from work. I was home in 60 minutes. It's been taking me anywhere from 75 minutes to 2 hours to get home the past few weeks.

It was not a route I would have even tried and parts of it didn't even know about! When she took me off on an exit before my usual 5 mile slow down to my normal exit, I was nervous, but went for it. Then she did the strangest thing! She basically had me loop around this funky way to get on this side street towards home. I have taken this street in the past attempts home (I've been driving this commute almost 10 years now) but accessed it from the exit prior...where there was always a long wait through a couple of lights to get turned on the street off the freeway and then the next left to get on this main road was another long wait through a couple of light sequences.  Samantha's sneaky little way saved some time. I had also stopped going home this way because once I dropped down the hill into my towns downtown area I'd sit at that light forever.  So I haven't gone this route in years. But, instead of going down this hill she had me cut off to another less traveled road down the hill and all these little side streets and on my way home to the other side of town.

I was converted!

Thursday morning she took me on a route that got me to work in 53 minutes! Seriously - I haven't gotten to work in less than an hour the past couple of years. Her route is shorter...IF traffic isn't terrible, but half the time it is terrible and since I never knew how it was going to be from day to day I just avoided it for the more consistent 60-65 minute route.

So, now I'm just going to let Samantha and Waze get me too and from work and have less hair pulling and more time :)