Just about everyone has felt the frustration of a road trip gone wrong. Sometimes, the GPS screws up and yet again, you end up in the boondocks instead of your desired location.
Sometimes, these miscalculations can have more serious repercussions than being late to your friend’s big party. According to Cosmopolitan, a 23-year-old Canadian woman recently made the mistake of blindly trusting her GPS, and ended up driving straight into Lake Huron.
Understandably, the woman chose not to talk to the media about her incident. However, the Toronto Sun reported that that woman had been driving through extreme fog and rain, making it nearly impossible to see through the windshield of her car. As a result of the poor driving conditions, the woman had no choice but to solely follow the directions of her GPS…Even if that meant driving down a boat launch at Little Tub Harbor and plunging into the Great Lake.
Const. Katrina Rubinstein-Gilbert told the Toronto Sun that driving into the lake isn’t as difficult or dramatic to do as you would think. “How the launch works, it’s not an airborne thing. It’s not ‘Dukes of Hazard.’ It kind of goes off the road and drops all of a sudden…So she would have been driving on the road, and then all of a sudden just dropped and hit water.”
Thankfully, the car stayed floating long enough for the woman to roll down the window of the car, crawl out and swim to safety. The woman luckily had no injuries—despite the water being only 40 degrees—and was even able to save her purse from her car. CP24 reported that the Ontario police and the Ministry of the Environment will not press any charges.
This isn’t the first time, and likely not the last, that too much trust in a GPS has landed someone in trouble. If we can learn anything from this unfortunate mishap, it’s that maybe the old-school paper map is the way to go—And if not that, then just drive veeeery slowly when you have to drive in bad conditions.