Living in Pleasantville - The Travels of a Garmin Nuvi

Our friends who first told us about Crofton refer to Crofton as Pleasantville. Whenever things happen that don't seem likely to happen many other places (at least not places around here), people will say things like, "that's Crofton for you," or "welcome to Pleasantville."

The truth is that we have enjoyed many of the places we've lived very much and have met great people in all of those places. In fact, if we end up stationed in some of the same places again, we know exactly where we will be looking for a house.

Still, we had our own living in Pleasantville experience over the Christmas holiday.

Trent brought our Garmin nuvi in and updated the maps etc. It was a day off from school over the Thanksgiving break I believe, and Ashley asked if she could go for a walk with the nuvi and check it out with the updated maps. I let her. She came back complaining that the maps wouldn't come up for her. I did something to the nuvi for her, and she put it in her coat pocket and went out. We didn't think anything of it afterward until Thanksgiving when we went looking for it and couldn't find it. Over the next week, we looked for it everywhere certain that Ashley had brought it back in etc. etc. Then, in early December, Trent received an e-mail from Garmin. It stated simply that our nuvi was found on the side of a road in Maryland and that the person who picked it up wanted it returned to its rightful owner.

At first, I was completely confused and wondering what road and how it possibly got there. That is when I started going through what I knew about the last time we had seen it and figured out that Ashley must have unwittingly dropped it and that it was somewhere in our own neighborhood. Trent has it password protected, so the individual who picked it up wouldn't have been able to figure out where its home was to return it to us. They took the huge step of returning it to Garmin though. I really do think that is impressive. Garmin later called, but by the time we got the message and called back, they had shipped the nuvi to the address they had on record, the house we lived in in Virginia. Sigh. At least we registered it, and there was a record of who it belonged to etc. The man who owns that house is currently stationed in Korea, so getting a hold of the current tenants was going to be tricky. Turns out we didn't need to. When the package arrived in VA, they figured out how to get a hold of us. He called and got our current address, and the nuvi is now home. Garmin restored its original settings or something like that. It thinks home is in VA again, but we can easily update it.

I truly believe that there are far more good people out there than bad. However, when what you hear the majority of the time are the bad stories, it becomes amazing to hear of people caring enough about getting a GPS device to its rightful owner that they mail it into the company with those express orders. Furthermore, getting our nuvi back instead of having to replace it meant that many people went out of their way to be good and helpful. I would like to think if I ever find myself in that position that I would also take the extra time to try and ensure a similar ending.