Oregon truck driver Jacob Cartwright was cruising through a rural part of Oregon, headed for Idaho to deliver a truckload of potato chips.
We'll get back to the chips in a minute.
Because this is really a story about what can happen when we believe our GPS more than ourselves. And that's pretty easy to do.
Cartwright initially put in the wrong delivery address into his GPS. That cost him some time. But correcting the mistake nearly cost him everything. According to Portland's KGW-TV:
He eventually realized he was on the wrong road and put in the correct address. The GPS then directed him to take a U.S. Forest Service road that started out paved, but eventually became impassable.
Just after midnight Wednesday, he started walking away from the direction he had come from without any food and just a few bottles of water, that he quickly drank. His trek included wading through snow. He covered himself with pine needles at night to try to stay warm.
"I was just eating snow at the end of the day, just trying to stay hydrated," Cartwright said. "I didn’t have food, and the only animals I saw were mice, that was it. I had no way of starting a fire, everything was so soaking wet nothing would spark."
At first he had no cell service, then his phone died. In the end, he covered 14 miles on foot and arrived back home four days after he vanished.
But what about the potato chips? Did he grab some of those for the long trek? "I'm not going to touch someone else's product," he told KGW. "To me, that's stealing."