New GPS

GPS's are great entertainment while driving. I don't own one but use the company one sometimes.

GPS is a wonderful tool, but you still have to look out the window. You can often find better routes with a paper map. The GPS will give you what it thinks is the shortest of fastest, but it may take you on a secondary road where you follow the school bus to save a few hundred yards of travel on the highway.

I use mine to find the location in the last mile or so. You can drive cross country with road signs, but when you get into the city, finding 126 Mystery Lane can be baffling.

I really like our GPS. No matter how stupid the route looks, normally it will get you there.

The last time I drove to the border (about 650 miles), I drove down using my selected map route, and came back listening to BITB (the bitch in the box). She got me home faster and better than my paper map route.

I still have some learning to do about it.

Overall, it is good technology. You just have to keep in mind it is making decisions like a computer, not as an experienced driver. My route to work is along a good (50 mph) road that takes me to a traffic light, I make a left and go a few more miles to work. The GPS wants me to make a left a half mile sooner, then a right, left, right, and finally a left on to the road to work. Rather than make all those turns on secondary streets and stop signs, it is just smarter to go the old way. Of course, if I was in a place never traveled, I'd not know that and follow along.

Last week in Gloucester, MA it took me to three wrong places. In once case, I knew it may because the web page warned people to follow their directions, not the GPS that takes you a half mile up the street. The restaurant I wanted to go to was on Essex Street and it seems there are two Essex Streets a couple of miles apart. I've not bothered to sort that one out yet. Gloucester is a very old city and the streets were laid out by a couple of psychotic drunks about 200 years ago. Not a straight line to be had.

The good news is, you push the "home" button and it will get you out of any place and headed in the right direction.

Ours can do quite a bit of filtering, will accept choices from which the decision trees are predicated.

Now, I need to be better at programming those functions.

My newer car gives me three choices when I plug in an address, a quickest route, a nearest route, and an alternate route. The latter, and to some extent the others, can be influenced by avoidance of large cities, avoidance of turnpikes, avoidance of tollway, etc etc.

Again, it is more capable that I am at the moment.

We knew that ;)

Paul,

I got a trip to PA and MO in October so that should bump the mileage up another 3,000 +

harryface

Let me know if you come to Houston.

You'll get past that distraction after the novelty wears off. At that point, when you're using it, you'll rely more on the directions it speaks to you than you will the map image. It becomes much more innoccuous.

Just don't drive onto a railroad track, as one local lady did, when the GPS voice told her to turn right LOL

Paul,

A club event will bring us to Texas in June 2011.

harryface