Getting Lost

(November 21: Revised this post, which I wrote really hastily between getting home from the Nintendo event and dashing back out to pick the kids up from school.)

Have you ever had one of those days that doesn't start out right -- and then gets progressively worse?

That was my experience this morning.

I had signed up to participate in an event yesterday morning at the Whole Foods Market in Pasadena, which my good friends at Nintendo were sponsoring to promote their new Personal Trainer Cooking game for the DS (review is up now at SoCal Stuff). That's me at left, with my Los Angeles Moms Blog friend, Jessica Gottlieb.

Simple enough, right? I wasn't sure how to get to that particular Whole Foods, but I figured it would be easy enough to Mapquest it this morning and print the directions out. I even arranged to meet Jessica and my other blogging friends Cyn and Adrienne there at 9:00 (figuring an hour would be more than enough time to get from my daughter's school in Northridge over to Pasadena).

But there was one thing wrong with my plan: I assumed that when I got up in the morning I would have Internet access.

Silly SoCal Mom. Of course, our Internet was down, and rebooting the system three times just confirmed it was down.

By this time, I had the kid yelling at ME that she would be late for school (how's that for turnaround)? So I sent Cyn (who lives out that way) a quick tweet asking for directions, got her to school (on time) and then, once I was safely out of the school traffic, I parked the car and used my Blackberry to see if I could get those directions.

I managed to locate the supermarket's website, but could not access the map.

Just then, Cyn found my tweet and called me for my address. Her emailed directions showed up on my Blackberry, and I was back in business.

I had now spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get to my destination and being neurotically punctual, I was now kind of a mess. When I saw the enormous traffic jam leading to the nearest freeway onramp, I decided I would move on to the next one east...

...except I could not find one. (I don't usually have a reason to do this and had forgotten that the exits and entrances to this particular freeway don't match!)

I ended up in San Fernando. I finally did find a different freeway onramp, which I thought would get me to the road I wanted... but I made some wrong turns and ended up heading WEST...

...back to my own neighborhood.

So I was now running 40 minutes late.

With that kind of track record, you can understand why I did not have a lot of hope for winning the Supermarket Sweep type of contest Nintendo was holding at the store! I apologized in advance to Jessica (who was going to be my teammate in this). She looked at me as if she thought I was kidding.

This is a woman who is not used to LOSING. I got the feeling she would not allow it to happen, even if she ended up running me over with the shopping cart.

Each team was given their own DS to share, all cued up to a recipe (the new game is kind of an instructional cooking project). We had 15 minutes to run through the market, grabbing the ingredients. The two winning teams would then face each other in second round cook-off, to be judged by one of the market's chefs -- and Evan Kleiman, chef owner of Angeli Caffe and host of my favorite foodie show on radio station KCRW. (I think I may have gushed when I  told her what a fan I am of her program).

Did I mention that this is a two-story Whole Foods, with a shopping cart escalator?

Jessica and I did a valiant job of rushing through the store, gathering the ingredients for Szechwan Fried Beef and were on our way to the finish line when she handed me the DS and instructed me to check that we hadn't missed anything.

We HAD missed something: a can of bamboo shoots.

I bounded back UP the escalator in search of the missing can, running through the Asian/International aisle and came up empty. I looked for canned vegetables. No shoots. I ran into the soup aisle. No shoots.

I nearly went on a desperate search in the dairy section when I heard on the loudspeaker that the two winning teams had made it.

Losing wasn't so bad. We got $20 Whole Foods gift cards, aprons and canvas shopping bags just for participating. And since we didn't have to be part of the cook-off, we were free to get some lunch. This was a good thing, because after spending 90 minutes looking at all the wonderful produce and cooked items at that store, we were all pretty hungry.

All in all, it was a pretty fun way to spend a morning. Even if all I seemed to do was get lost.

Comments

[Sher]

Honey I once got lost in Germany on my way to purchase a trunk load of crystal and wound up at the border of a country whose name I can't spell and who at that time, were not inclined to give directions to big-haired American women driving blue Fords.

BTW...totally jealous of your two story Whole Foods. I've decided I'm going to start a blog called "Why I'm jealous of Donna".

[Los Angelista]

Aww, I wish I'd been able to make it. I got suckered into helping my son's teacher at the last moment. Besides, I can NOT cook to save my life. I would've been a total liability!

[Liz@ThisFullHouse]

Heh, that's okay, I've been feeling lost (a lot) lately, but your adventure sounded much yummier :)