Getting Lost To Find Your Way

Today, I decided to go for a morning walk at Flushing Meadows Corona Park (FMCP) which is quite close to where I live. I have explored the park before many times. Today, I decided I would find my way from the park to the Queens Botanical Gardens, because I knew there was a bridge from the Gardens to the park. I had seen the bridge, but never ventured over it.

If anyone knows FMCP, you know it is enormous and that it gives access to cars and is surrounded by expressways and parkways that loop around it....the Van Wyck, the Long Island Expressway...the Grand Central Parkway.

Just to get to Meadow Lake where there is a parking lot I like, I take the Van Wyck North to the Long Island Expressway East, loop around Van Wyck South and enter the parking lot (mind you this takes only three minutes)...I park and walk. Sound complicated? I got lost many times trying to find my way.

So, today there are the qualification tennis matches and I walk all the way to where the entrance is...all this week and there is a ton of staff to ask questions. So, I question this one guy who has a map of the park unfolded trying to figure out where to direct this other lady to a building where there is Jai Lai or something like that...never heard of FMCP having a building with Jai Lai...could be...so...anyway, my turn and he says "Yeah, you can walk this way or take the tram." "No, I don't want the tram", I tell him. "I want the exercise."

I follow the signs and come to a crossroads and ask these official looking guys...who have NO IDEA. I see a woman and young girl coming from the other direction, from College Point Boulevard..."Do you know how to get to the Queens Botanical Gardens (QBG)? There is a bridge, I think." She says they just crossed it and I am happy that though she is obviously Asian, she speaks English fluently.

I find the bridge and I am thrilled to find the QBG and must find the bathroom which I know is in the Administration Building.

"Sorry, Ma'am. There is filming going on. You can't go this way." They are filming an Aetna Insurance commercial. There is all this yellow CAUTION tape roping off areas inaccessible.

I implore the woman that I desperately need a bathroom and she says there is another one around the back. I can't find it. I ask a woman working the garden if the bathroom exists and how to get to it and she directs me to go up the ramp to the roof of the building that then slopes down. Ooops! It just goes up and up and up. A door. A cameraman is there and tons of knapsacks from the crew. "Excuse me", I blurt out. "Is there a bathroom I can use?" He tells me it is down the ramp. So, confusing...there was a fork in the ramp of pebbles...Eureka!!!!!
I finally find the bathroom.

So, now I know how to find my way from FMCP to QBG and to the hidden bathroom.
By getting lost, I found my way.