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To Follow Waze 0r Not to Follow Waze That Is the Question!

By Avril Kormornik

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Andy and I together with Rowena and Graham thought it would be a good idea to book for the opening ceremony of the Maccabiah Games in the Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem—I mean what a wonderful experience—so we did. We thought we would leave at lunchtime, take our time, have a browse around the Malcha Mall—there is nothing like a little retail therapy—and have a nice meal somewhere and then make our way to the stadium in plenty of time for the 7.30pm start. Then we heard President Biden would be coming to Israel and guess what—he was also going to be at the opening ceremony— wonder if he was also planning a bit of retail therapy beforehand? However, it now meant that all roads leading to Jerusalem were going to be closed and security measures were going to be at their highest. The question now was how were we going to get there? We found out by chance that we could register a parking space at the Jerusalem Zoo and then there were shuttles backwards and forwards to the stadium which was nearby. We thought this was a great idea and so we left Netanya at 1pm and Waze said we would be at our destination at 2.30pm—that was fine, we settled for that.

We headed off, I had packed plenty of food—like you do, just in case, joking that if we get stuck somewhere at least we won’t starve—not thinking that this actually might happen. As we were going merrily on the way, Waze changed our estimated time of arrival to 3.30pm—okay that was fine no problem we still had plenty of time to do what we had planned.

As we got nearer to Jerusalem, Waze redirected us through the Jerusalem Forest which is a very nice route and along this road it looked less like a road more like a bumpy dirt track with large boulders along the route together with trees on one side and a sheer drop on the other side. This couldn’t be right. After a 5 minute stop debating what we should do and as no cars had come back from that route, we decided to follow them. Everything was going ‘well’ as we were crawling along for a few minutes —that is if you didn’t look to the right at the sheer drop and you kept the car to the left against the clifftop—when we suddenly saw that the cars ahead had all stopped and the passengers were outside their cars

very picturesque and I knew from experience we weren’t too far away from the Zoo, so we thought it was fine especially as there were a few other cars going in the same direction. We came to a crossroads where Waze was directing us to turn left although the road was not properly tarmac-ed. That’s where the ‘fun’ started. The further we went looking a bit traumatised. Has there been an accident? What’s ahead—we soon found out.

We all got out of the car and spoke to the other drivers who had also followed Waze and all were heading to the parking lot at the Zoo en route to the games. Basically Waze had sent us all on a scary wild goose chase. Imagine the scene a now single-track dirt track with 15 cars ahead of us, by now at least 10 cars behind us and nowhere to go—

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