I think I know what happened, as I double checked my skills. I didn’t have Lay of the Land I, and only LoTLII. Therefore it was only searching for ‘the closest HIGHEST TIER” node to harvest. LoTLI just gets me to the closest one, and then it worked.
I was about to ask what’s going on in a different post, but I figured it out from there. Maybe a highlight/suggestion JUST IN CASE people forget/didn’t know in the FAQs?