How to be a navigator

One of the things that people ask me most about Go Banana (other than where they can get themselves a rockin' race shirt) is how I came be the navigator for the team.

You have to understand our team. Most races we have gone to are three person races so the choices are Brian, Jason or myself:

Brian: On the way to our latest race, Brian was driving and managed to get confused about the logistics of going through a Tim Hortons drive-through (you can't just drive up to the window and skip the "ordering process"). Then the whole "Wendy's, Walmart, Tim Hortons" mini-plex parking lot totally threw him for a loop and it was two U-Turns before we were back on the highway going to the race. Bad idea for Brian to navigate, he is a "head-down lets-go" engine kind of guy.

Jason: Jason's got a very laid back approach to life, works well for him and astounds most others. He carries this over to the navigation aspect of racing too. When a checkpoint is "at a scenic lookout" he thinks we should just be "going up the hill until we find some picnic tables, then we'll be there" ... never mind the fact that you can't really see the hill and it is only really ATV accessible and we are going there overland. The next checkpoint was at the "base of a ski hill" so to him that translated to "we'll just walk to the lift towers, I'm sure we'll see them". Jason does bring us back to earth when Brian and I are pondering options while "misplaced" in the middle of the woods with witty comments like "Hmm, well, this isn't very scenic, must not be the checkpoint".

So that leaves me ... who in the last race managed to take us on a 6km detour to a scenic matress dump in the country. While I feel bad for my team, I feel worse for the couple of teams that decided to just follow our lead and joined us on our round-about route to the checkpoint.
I'm not really so much the navigator, as the guy holding the map most races.

They key of course is what happens in a race when you put the Engine, the Questioner and the Navigator together: We take snack breaks (no napping!), add on mileage for scenic excursions and chat up the locals (on the way to the dump) ... and still pull a respectible time.

Thomas