Gps

Two men found sleeping in a car were arrested yesterday in Haverford Township. Turns out they were stealing more than a few winks, according to police. At 6:35 a.m., police say, Robert K. Wells, 22, of Philadelphia and Dwight Hicks, 20, were found asleep in a stolen green Toyota Camry in the 100 block of Whitemarsh Road. A Haverford resident had called police, concerned that two men might be passed out in the car. At first, Wells told the responding officers that he had borrowed the car - for $40 - from someone he didn't know.

The driver in the bus crash that killed four people Saturday has been placed on "indefinite" unpaid leave. John Tomaszewski, 59, who police said is from the Yardville section of Hamilton Township, Mercer County, was driving a Megabus headed from Philadelphia to Toronto when he missed his exit near Syracuse, N.Y. He attempted to double back by taking the Onandaga State Parkway, where he crashed into a low-hanging bridge. Deanna Armstrong, 18, of Voorhees; Kevin Coffey, 19, a Temple University business major from Manhattan, Kan.; a Malaysian preacher; and a computer technician from India died in the early-morning crash.

Gridlock. It's something almost every Philadelphia-area driver faces with great regularity. I didn't arrive in Southeastern Pennsylvania until I was 33, and the roads of Central and Western Pennsylvania and even Cleveland move at a much different - read: faster - pace than here in the City of Brotherly Love. The Philadelphia lesson: Patience is a virtue. But how to get through the long commutes? Here are some strategies - my own and others' - for making the most of a slow situation.

JANE GOLDEN can't help it. The executive director of the city's Mural Arts Program can't sit still, lie low or be chillin' any day of the week, especially on her days off. "I hear that if a shark stops moving, it dies," says Golden, 56, seated Sunday at her dining-room table in Fairmount. "I'm like a shark, but a nice shark!" She laughs at her own clarification. Golden keeps swimming straight ahead, meeting with two visiting artists and checking out possible mural locations with a staffer.

This weekend is my mother's birthday. A big one: 80. We will do little to celebrate. She has been gone for an eternity, 16 years. My daughter was then in diapers, scampering over the hospital bed, giving my mother her last moments of unbridled bliss. My mother - Barbara to people who didn't know her, Bobbie to those who did - adored the new. Babies, trends, the latest anything. She was an enthusiastic, early adopter of gadgetry, some of it questionable, which she was often slow to master.

I'M ANGRY and concerned at the way I was treated at the taxi station at 30th Street Station recently when I was trying to get to Presbyterian Hospital for my first chemotherapy appointment. Driver after driver refused to take me - saying they did not know where the hospital was. (I guess they all forgot that they have GPS - or maybe the line of expensive suits waiting behind me just looked like more important fares.) Finally, after six or seven cabs refused me and absolutely no one offered any help, I entered the next cab and refused to get out until the driver agreed to take me to the hospital.

It's like playing a video game, except you are outdoors, in the middle of a shimmery, crystal-blue pond, surrounded by a sea of floating, bright-red cranberries. Oh, and you are sitting on a wet picker, farming equipment that motors across the watery bogs, knocking cranberries off submerged shrubs so that the air-filled fruit can bob to the surface. Still, you must train your eyes on a laptop, wired to a global positioning system, and steer away from hidden drainage ditches in the bogs.

Unfasten your seat belt! A stop at this road-trip-planning website will give you a trunk-load of reasons to return for another visit. Name: Myscenicdrives.com What it does: Equips day-trippers and road warriors with tips and tools they need to improve their next drive. Get enticing descriptions, worthy detours, park passes, and a gas calculator all in one place. What's hot: Don't miss the interactive maps that can add such features as Vista Points, Side-Trips, Hikes and Museums.

Louis Roselli was plugging in his GPS in the parking lot of the Absecon Home Depot when his wife started screaming. He turned to see a car veer off nearby Route 30 and into a retention pond on the side of the road. The splash as the car hit the water, he said, was "higher than a telephone pole. " Roselli, 58, started the car and raced toward the pond. Four wheels pointed toward the sky. A young man surfaced, gasping, and yelled that three more people were still trapped in the car. "My heart just sank -- like, 'No, don't do this to me," Roselli said.

Louis Roselli was plugging in his GPS in the parking lot of the Absecon Home Depot when his wife started screaming. He turned to see a car veer off Route 30 and into a retention pond on the side of the road. The plume of water the car sent up when it hit the pond was "higher than a telephone pole," he said. Roselli, 58, started his car and raced toward the pond. Four wheels pointed toward the sky. A young man surfaced, gasping, and yelled that three others were trapped in the car. "My heart just sank, like, 'No, don't do this to me,' " Roselli said.