Nation

MeetWays

Making plans with cross-town peeps always involves the offer "let's meet halfway" -- laughably hollow, because it's easier to just drive to the guy's house than figure out where the hell halfway actually is. To make the lie a reality, use MeetWays.

MeetWays is a locally-based G-map that finds the closest-to-equidistant address between two points, and gives you the lowdown on the surrounding area, which hopefully isn't a vast body of water. Just input the two starting addresses (minus punctuation -- for some reason, MeetWays hates commas) and what kind of venue you'd like your encounter to occur at, and MeetWays'll shoot back the exact center address, plus the nearest-by matches of requested businesses, since "outside whatever's at 1208 W. Pico" isn't going to get anybody running to their car. Search criteria for the nearby spots can be general (restaurant, video store, senior center, etc) or specific ("burrito", "20/20 Video", "wherever the Mahjong is popping").

MeetWays also has partnerships with car rental companies and hotels -- once you find this magical center-point, it might take you several days to find that your date's personal mythical location doesn't in fact exist.

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