Is it right or left?

I am going to be in so much trouble next year. I am directionally-impaired as my parents like to call it. It took me a long time to learn my left from my right and I still have problems with it sometimes. For my driving test when I was 16 I wore a ring on my right hand, so when the instructor told me to turn right I wouldn't end up turning left (believe me this has happened before, even in the driver's ed car). Last summer I went to DC for the first time and had to take the metro from Union Station to Springfield. Well somehow I got lost on the metro (yes the DC metro, the easy one with color-coded, easy to understand routes). I ended up in Vienna and had to back track while my friend and her sister could not believe how stupid I was.

It's not only cities that give me a hard time either. Once during cross country practice I was leading my friend through the woods and instead of going to the neighborhood we were supposed to meet the rest of our team at, I ended up taking her to an elementary school, pretty far away from our cars. She was not very happy and refused to listen to my directions after this, so she made us run back along the roadway. Our entire run ended up being 80 minutes long (the longest I had run at that point). Our coach had sent people from our team out to look for us. We were only supposed to have gone on a 40 minute run. After that no one believed I knew the trails at all, even though I made myself learn them thoroughly.

Yesterday was one of those wonderful days where things go completely wrong. I was supposed to drive me and my friend to the water park a few cities over. Everything was going fine and I was catching up with my friend until the directions I was following told me to take the left fork into a highway that happened to be closed. Not a big deal, it old me to follow a different route for a detour, except after the initial, follow this other highway signs, the detour signs ended and I was lost. Luckily my grandmother happens to live right off the highway we had to take, so I was not completely lost, but my grandmother was not home and I don't have a GPS in my car (you would think my parents would buy me one). We decided to have lunch and figure out what to do. I called my dad after lunch, he gave me new directions that seemed a bit strange (why was I taking 220 south and then following some other road and taking 220 north...how would that work). I followed the crazy directions and was doing well until the directions ended with "fork left"...except there was no fork, and there was nowhere to go left. I ended up back in the same place I started. At this point it was pretty late in the day and we were tired, so we gave up, went to my friend's pool, and had Mexican for dinner (where I had to make a complete ass of myself, typical).