Last summer we got together with my old high school pals Christopher and Suzanne for a day at Suzanne’s parents’ camp in Maine. Chris and his boys were good enough to let the three of us ride with them in their SUV on our way to see Suzy and her family, and in the process we got a live demonstration of using one of those GPS highway mappers to find our way to Belgrade Lake. Chris, who sometimes likes to be called C.G. Whiz, is an intrepid soul with a penchant for following obscure backroads and uncertain routes, so I was a little surprised that he had become a devotee of a GPS gadget. But, as we drove along, I was very impressed with it’s ability to tell us exactly where to go along the route Chris had requested, and it got us right to the actual dirt road that took us to the camp and even knew when we’d come to the correct house.
Since then, I have been very covetous of having one for myself. My cooking business (and now also my PC support business) often requires me to drive all over the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, frequently to places I have never been in my entire life. And, as anyone who has ever spent time in Massachusetts knows, road signage around here is appallingly bad. You can never count on finding a street sign when you need one, or, if there is one, it has been there since 1927 and is totally unreadable. We moved here 11 years ago, and Bridget and I both still drive around with Boston-area road map books on hand. If you’ve ever tried to drive while reading a roadmap, looking for a non-existant street sign, while being honked and fingered at by the Masshole in the car behind you, you know it can be a real challenge to get where you’re going, and the difficulty goes up by 100% at night.
So I made an impulse purchase this morning and ordered the Garmin StreetPilot c320 GPS mapper. It’s not the latest-and-greatest model, but it was very reasonably priced at several online retailers and gets good reviews. Then I had a bit of inspiration. On A quick check with the Gestapo shows that they don’t specifically prohibit GPS devices on planes, so there’s no problem bringing one along. The Garmin device I have ordered comes preloaded with all the street map data for North America, but a few more quick passes on Google turned up an SD card with street map data for the UK and Ireland that is compatible.
Most of these GPS highway mappers have computerized voices that will announce directions audibly to you while you drive, so you don’t have to look at the map on the tiny screen. It would be too much to ask that this UK/Ireland module come with the appropriate brogue, I guess.
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