Of Maps and Minds

Our hotel in Minneapolis required three separate elevators to get from the parking ramp to our room.

I’m not making this up. The ramp adjoined the downtown Marriott where we stayed, so we took the ramp’s elevator down to the skyway level to access our hotel. And then had to navigate the skyway system to get into the hotel. Down to the entrance and then up one elevator to the fifth floor Marriott city center lobby, then around a corner of the lobby to a different elevator bank to get up to the room.

The room was fine — a nice view off to north and west of green and brown treetops, dotted wth yellow. We were close to Hennepin avenue with a partial view of the Target Center, home of NBA Timberwolves.

The skyway system, for those unfamiliar, is like those habit trails for pet hamsters, only the skyways connect buildings. They’re built over and across streets, connecting blocks so people can surpass winter, mostly, and Minneapolis has skyways that would do guinea pig scientists proud.

It became a challenge for me to find the easiest way from the ramp to the next door hotel. I couldn’t believe it took so many twists and turns, so I kept trying to find shortcuts. Which meant I led my wife into stairwells that had no doors for five floors down to the street level, letting us out into the heat at unexpected places.

What got me was that I didn’t lose my bearings. I knew where I was in relation to our room and car the whole time. In fact, there were times where, had I been able to open our tenth floor window and lob a shoe out, ignoring the roof and ramp levels above our car, it would have landed within a few feet of our rent-a-mobile.

Intending to explore the skyways as a way of getting to know downtown Minneapolis better, I asked the concierge for a map. It was rather elaborate. If sudoku is supposed to help brain function, maybe learning the skyways would improve mine, with the added bonus of helping me learn my way around downtown.

But you know how it is with the best laid plans of mice and men. Our schedule prevented me from getting out and really checking it out — we were really there for a long weekend, only. But for a couple little bridge over the baking street segments, I never got to really test my sudoku-skyway talent.

So I have to admit, the skyway won, based on that ramp-to-room segment. If the skyway system is a guinea pig-like IQ test for people, to see how well they can find their way around, I failed miserably. I never found an easy way to get from that damned parking ramp to our room without walking a route combining the more confusing aspects of a microchip and a bowl of spaghetti. The skyway system kicked my butt. After two days, I gave up and just did the innumerable switchbacks and three-elevator rollercoaster up and down. I think my bemused wife was glad.

Years ago, when I first moved to California, some of the inefficiencies of the Golden State kind of bugged me. Yet I realized things were simplified and streamlined here, so that the systems, to a relative degrees, were made easier for people. In Minnesota rules seemed more rigid and more strictly enforced, so that people service the system a bit more.

There are benefits to each; having spent my first 24 years (more or less) in Minnesota, I’m a bit more programmed for the individual-sacrificed-to-the-system notion than the other way around, but I’ve gotten used to things out here in California.

For instance, driving. Things generally move out here. Busy as it is, they find detours or workarounds that keep the volume of traffic going. If part of a road is closed, they’ll keep a lane open and alternate directions, as much as possible. And they do what they can to re-open roads quickly.

With the exception of Berkeley, which has the most dawdling, head-in-the-clouds, aimless traffic in the Bay Area, a city whose traffic system seems designed with antagonism toward motor vehicles, Bay Area traffic moves as well as can be expected given how many vehicles are on the road.

We ran into three separate detours on little roads in Washington county (between St. Paul and Wisconsin), the first two between Stillwater and Afton and the third enroute to the airport that had us sweating a bit. I’ll bet all those detour signs are still up. They just count on you adjusting to the delay of the detour. And I haven’t even gotten to the madhouse of driving in the West Bank last Saturday, yet.

But first, I must get ready and go to work.