I had a bit of scare last night!!! I was attending a small campfire with some friends that I made here in Quartzsite AZ. We had attended Beer Bellys adult day care for a burger and beer, and I left their campsite on the way back to my bus to retrieve a chair to sit around the campfire with on my eBike.
(https://www.crystalpoint.com/cpdownloads/public/outgoing/Freds/BeerBellysQuartzsite.jpg)
Needless to say, I got lost in the dark!!!
As one desert dirt road looks like another here in the free 14-day BLM camping area Scaddan Wash. I was in no real danger as I could see the lights of town and a nearby powerline.
However, the bus was extremely difficult to locate in the dark, I could find lots of RV's and I was looking for the group that was near my bus.
Here is a daylight picture of my bus at about half the distance that I was lost at.
(https://www.crystalpoint.com/cpdownloads/public/outgoing/Freds/LostBusQuartzsite.jpg)
Anyway, technology to the rescue!!! I had experimented with the application WhatThreeWord's on my smart phone a day earlier.
WhatThreeWords encodes an GPS location to three spoken English words. When you click navigate in this application you enter the three words and it then plans out a route on how to get to that location.
It also has a compass navigation mode which got me back to my bus as I knew that my campsite was at the location "stuck.winning.softner".
(https://www.crystalpoint.com/cpdownloads/public/outgoing/Freds/WhatThreeWords.jpg)