Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

There's a story about Spain that I've been omitting.

On the way to Poio, I followed GPoS thinking that it would get me where I wanted to be.

After some rights and some lefts off the main road, I found myself climbing a mountain and thinking: "This hotel must be pretty secluded."

I was in a terrible hurry to get to the hotel in order to do some work, and despite my experience with GPoS, I trusted it to get me to the right place.

Shortly after the incident where I dropped Black and Yellow, I continued to follow GPoS down an unpaved road. I would follow this "road" for more than 30 minutes climbing and descending completely unpaved trails that I suspect were horse trails. The reason that I suspect that they were horse trails is because of the droppings that I found on the road. Now, I'm no expert tracker, but I can pretty easily identify the droppings of a mammal that is large enough to carry a human on its back.

In my head, I knew that I should have pulled over for 30 seconds to take a picture so that this entry would make sense, but I was stressing about the work that I had to do. Also, I was enjoying myself despite the rush I was in, because I was riding the motorcycle for the purpose for which it was designed. It is a multi-purpose motorcycle and can handle unpaved dirt roads, just as easily as it can handle highways. It will never be a pure dirt bike, nor will it be a high performance race bike, but it straddles road and dirt equally well.

At one point GPoS suggested that I go down a very steep dirt hill and I decided that it was wrong and I should have trusted my instincts by staying on the paved roads with cars.

Reflecting on the incident over the last few weeks, it occurred to me that I'd made irrational decisions because of the pressure that I put on myself to get to the hotel.

I read a couple of very interesting books in the last year called Sway and Predictably Irrational. Both books present the hypotheses and results of several experiments conducted to understand the psychology of making decisions that go against the facts that we have in a given situation.

Had I been able to remove myself from the situation, I would have advised myself against the decisions that I made by citing the obviously rational evidence.