Google Maps directions require accomplishing the impossible.

So CAINE (UVa's anime club) decided to go to the Cherry Blossom Festival (or as we call it to try to sound cool (inb4 GIRUGAMESH), Sakura Matsuri, which is "Cherry Blossom Festival" in Japanese). Getting there from Charlottesville is simple. Take 29 North to Interstate 66 East, then exit at the Vienna/Fairfax-GMU Metro station, park, and ride the Metro the rest of the way to avoid the nightmare that is driving in Washington D.C. Getting back is equally easy, just get back on I-66 West, and then 29 South. Not hard, right?

Google Maps wanted me to somehow dart across the 4-lane-wide Capitol Beltway (I-495 loop around Washington, D.C.) from an entrance ramp to an exit ramp.

Of course I have a link. (and the above screencap in case they've fixed it)

Zoom in where the blue line crosses itself and you'll see what I'm talking about.

How should it go? Here are revised directions, (screencap thereof above) created by dragging the endpoint around to bring the route within the possibilities of human capability. Purposefully created with the same viewport and zoom level so you can see the difference.

I've sent them a support thing telling them of the error, providing the first link and the suggested (and correct) correction of using I-66 exit 62 instead, which dumps you right into the Vienna/Fairfax-GMU Metro station parking lot.

Now, I am partially at fault here. I wasn't in the rightmost lane when we noticed the sign clearly stating "Vienna/Fairfax-GMU Metro Station Exit 62". This is due to my habit of driving one lane over from the rightmost lane anywhere in or near a huge city like Washington, D.C. I do this so that people can enter and exit onto the highway without me having to slow down, speed up, or change lanes to accomodate.

However, the sign is entirely too close to the exit (too close for me to have changed lanes and gotten onto the exit), and SERIOUSLY GOOGLE WHAT THE FUCK DRIVING ACROSS A 4 LANE HIGHWAY IN LESS THAN A TENTH OF A MILE DID YOU SERIOUSLY THINK THAT WAS POSSIBLE. There's only one time of day where such a maneuver is possible, and that's at midnight when nobody's on the Beltway. We were attempting it just before 10 AM. I made it two lanes, had I tried for a third or the fourth plus the holy grail, there would have been a pileup. Not to mention that the parking lot for the Metro station is NOT on the other side of the road, so the effective U-turn these directions gave was invalid to begin with.

What did we do? Well, I couldn't traverse the remaining two lanes in time to hop off at route 7 and get on 495 going the other way, so I did the very next exit, turned around in the driveway of the CapitalOne building, and after much frustration we made it to the Metro station.

Getting home was relatively pain-free. We did caravan three cars from the Vienna Metro station to the Fuddrucker's in Annandale where we ate dinner, but we went right over 495 in the process so I just hopped on that (going north, seems unintuitive but isn't, we were south of where I-66 meets I-495) and then hopped onto I-66 West and we were on our way home.

At this point it's less of an "I was stupid" issue and more of either a "Google can't give directions to anywhere in Washington D.C. worth shit" or a "Washington D.C.'s signage is seriously lacking" issue.

The festival itself was great. Perhaps I'll make another post after I get a fuckton of sleep that describes some parts of it in greater detail.