I may have a reputation for being a bad navigator. Growing up dropping and twisting along the rolling roads of Georgia was no help to honing my sense of direction. My vice has been compromised by now and I am shunned to the backseat most of the time when my family needs a reliable source of direction, a feat my older sister usually takes on. If only this realization came earlier to save my siblings and I from fighting over the front seat as kids.

Despite my difficulties, I made the decision to move to a far away land of unknown terrain for college: New York City. Thankfully, I have found myself understanding my left and right better while traversing the grid-like system of the city’s streets on foot than by wandering backroads in a vehicle. What really got everyone worried was when I decided to study abroad in the fall of my junior year. Alone.

With fearful thoughts of me navigating airports and foreign streets by myself, my mom decided to come with me to Florence a few days early to drop me off. Her efforts were in vain, because together we still managed to make a dreadful wrong turn getting back to our hotel. To remedy this mistake, we tucked ourselves in a corner and pulled out a paper map like two explorers. Our slight arguing and comical attempts to imaginatively place ourselves inside the map conjured up a local asking if we needed help.

Our wrong turn turned into ten minutes of us listening to this man’s story of owning a restaurant across the way and how he has a family with a daughter my age. Acting as our knight-in-shining armor, he offered to close up his restaurant and help us back to our hotel.

Did my mom and I leave after he left, afraid we were going to get kidnapped when he came back to retrieve us? Yes. But that does not take away from the experience of hearing a local’s personal life story (whether it was true or not). The entertainment in the moment and the laughter afterwards made for a good memory.

After my mom left, I quickly learned Florence is notorious for its cobblestone streets swept with an array of colorful local art and wrapped in an aroma of savory cheeses and velvety wine. In other words, it is very easy to get distracted and off track — again, a track I am not very good at staying on to begin with.

To get that study abroad experience, I made it my mission to walk around the city every couple of days. However, I got so caught up in making sure I was going the right way that I missed so much of what was going on around me. I kept my nose stuck in my phone to keep a weather eye on Google Maps rather than on the glistening gold on the Ponte Vecchio or the glowing pink and green stone of the Duomo.

That was until I made a seemingly dooming mistake and got confident enough in my routes that I put my phone away. Florence is the exact opposite of New York City. I thought I could take a turn one block later to get to the same road, but Florence’s streets would pop me out into a completely different area. I was making wrong turns every which way, but that is how I found my favorite cafe, the most beautiful artisanal stores and little pockets of natural beauty.

My favorite part of my weekend getaway trips with friends was purposefully making wrong turns away from our hotel by walking around aimlessly to discover what Google Maps could not point us towards.

Right now, I am sure people are seeing where I am going with this. I am not claiming to have cracked some sort of code. Everyone knows the cheesy saying “not all who wander are lost,” Miley Cyrus’ song “The Climb” or the poem “The Road Not Taken.” I could emulate these messages, but I simply want people to see the value in making a mistake.

Even back home in Georgia, the wrong turn that unexpectedly put me onto the highway for the first time had its advantages. After my screams of terror for an entire exit, I realized how this silly mistake helped me overcome a drivers’ rite of passage. Do I ever go on the highway? No. But at least I have done it and know I will be okay if it ever happens again.

I have beaten myself up over mistakes repeatedly and I am sure my fellow Fordham students have done the same. It gets me nowhere every single time. But my habit of turning left instead of right and my hours getting lost en route made me realize wrong turns can be transformed not necessarily into right ones, but at least ones worthwhile.