(Written November 2011) The fact that my husband and I can now claim that we have managed to get lost in Egypt, England, Tanzania, Italy, and now Kuwait, not to mention countless states in the U.S., has quite possibly elevated us from our mere “Getting Lost - Professional” status, to “Getting Lost - Master”.  We’re awaiting the judges’ final decision.

Now, in general we don’t mind getting lost.  It’s truly inevitable, even with all of the gadgetry available.  And moving to a new city, let alone new country, pretty much ensures that we’ll spend a few weeks, or more, getting lost.  For example, this past Saturday we made the simple mistake of turning left, when we should have turned right, trying to attend a brunch we’d been invited to.  We knew something was amiss when we were told to look for the villas on the right, but all we saw was the Arabian Gulf.  “Do they live on a houseboat?” I asked.  “They must be close to the border of Iraq, considering the distance we’ve traveled,” muttered hubby.  We were both wrong; and after a 90-minute drive that should have taken us 12 minutes, we corrected our mistake, bade farewell to the border guards and finally found the house.

The previous weekend we had taken my husband’s new boss and his wife, who had just arrived, out to a large supermarket we’d been to twice.  Coming from the boss’s neighborhood (a new area for us), however, spun us completely in circles, but after driving in a few more circles and tacking on an hour-long side-jaunt to the airport and back, we finally made it. 

We were told when we arrived in Kuwait that it really wasn’t possible to get truly lost, “You just might find yourself not where you want to be.”  Well, we have been doing a bang-up job of repeatedly finding ourselves where we don’t really want to be.  An added frustration is that Kuwait City is relatively small.  I have heard and read several comments that Kuwait itself is just a little smaller than New Jersey, so driving around Kuwait City, would be like navigating Trenton – eventually you should get it.  We’re still waiting. But in the meantime, despite our lack of bearings, we’re doing our best to look at all these driving adventures as “together time,” with periodic bouts of the crankies and some irrationality thrown in for fun. And next time we'll bring brownies for the border guards.