Dan, I'll try to get this into a more understandable form.

If I drive for eight hours along I-45, pull over, climb out and you climb in the same vehicle, and you drive for 8 minutes along I-45, we are both travelling along the same route.

Doesn't mean that you will have gone as far as I. Although you are getting closer to the goal, partly because I drove for 8 hours, and you have driven for 8 minutes. But we are heading in the same direction.

It means that you didn't turn off I-45, that overall the direction you are going is the same direction I was going.

It means that if you later say I was on the wrong route, then you were also, that you continued the same route.

No "in other words" are necessary, I'm sure.

Arf