Google-Blocked from Mr. Christmas

You can't get to Mr. Christmas with Google maps.

My caller had the most unimaginative, been-there, done-that photo assignment this week for a local publication, to get photos of people enjoying over-the-top Christmas displays. I consulted the T-D's list and emailed him a few addresses in his neighborhood, then told him to come get me and I'd drive him to a few places in my area of town. I knew the streets, I thought, and it'd go quick with me behind the wheel. He refused. (I guess it has something to do with not wanting to be seen with your mother, or something.)

Instead, I had to provide directions over the phone. The first place went okay, then I provided directions to the famous house of Mr. Christmas on 2300 Wistar Court. Since he was coming from the highly decorated houses of Pine Grove Drive, I instructed him via Broad Street. Right turn off Broad onto Wistar Street, four blocks down, left on Wistar Court. I am looking right at Google maps.

He calls back and says the street dead ends on Biscayne. That's not what the map says, I tell him. I'm right here, he says. Well, I can't tell what your situation is because I'm not there and the map says....and then he shouts at me that I purposely misdirected him because I wanted to go. But the map says....

Next night, as I'm getting ready to go to the boring office Christmas party, I see the Crazy Lights show on TLC and there's Mr. Christmas. I know it's an old show because they interview Cynthia McMullen in her messy little Times-Dispatch cubicle, and she's gone, but surely Mr. Christmas is still there. His street wouldn't have disappeared like Brigadoon. All I can think of at the boring Christmas office party is leaving early and finding out what happened on Biscayne Road.

We get there, and sure enough, Wistar Street dead ends at someone's driveway, which has a street sign on it that says Wistar Street. (Who ever saw a street sign at the end of a driveway?) We turn the brights on and can see Wistar Street continues right on the other side of this driveway, but there's a metal barricade keeping you from driving on the driveway, over a little stretch of this house's lawn, and back onto Wistar Street. We go up and down Biscayne but cannot find another street that will hook us back up to Wistar.

Back at home, I Google-map it again, ask for directions, and Google Maps innocently draws me a route right through this person's yard. On the map, Wistar Street goes right through to the end from Broad. In reality, you can't get to the end of it with the Wistar Court and Wistar Place cul-de-sacs unless you enter from Skipwith. And here in this conundrum is where Mr. Christmas abides, ever elusive to those of us Wise Men coming from the North. That just ain't right.