Polish pottery and the GPS

Friday a friend and I embarked on a trip to buy Polish pottery at a shop a friend of hers owns in the Netherlands. I didn't know where the friend's shop was but knew we were spending the night in Valkenburg, which was recommended to us as a picturesque little town. So we set the GPS for Valkenburg and set out on our merry way. When "Jane" told us to go towards Brussels, instead of Liege (where our instincts told us we should be heading), we thought Jane was just taking us around the Brussels ring. So we kept going. Past the Brussels airport we were soon heading toward Antwerp. A little voice was telling me that Antwerp wasn't REALLY the direction we wanted to go in, but Jane seemed pretty sure that's where we wanted to go. After going around the Antwerp ring and seeing signs for Rotterdam I was definitely sure we didn't want to go in that direction, despite Jane's insistence. So we doubled back to Antwerp, hit the ring again, and followed the signs for Liege. Jane took that in stride and then proceeded to direct us away from Liege - again. On our third swing through the Antwerp ring road we stopped at a rest stop, bought a map, and rather rudely silenced Jane. By this time we'd been on the road for two and a half hours and were still two hours away from our destination - on a trip that should have taken a total of two hours. We made our way east across Belgium and eventually crossed into the Netherlands where we should have been all along.

Turns out there are two Valkenburgs, one of them on the coast, which was where Jane was trying to take us. The other one is just a few kilometers from Maastricht, which is just a few kilometers over the border from Belgium on the east. Our Valkenburg was indeed a cute little town. And I got some cool Polish pottery from my friend's friend's store!