Another toy

Last weekend I went on two hikes and both of them were road trips to the west of me.

And both times there were at least two roads closed on my route. Since I just look at Google Maps and write down which roads to drive on---when something is closed it's really not a good thing.

I got lost multiple times and it took a hell of a lot longer than it should have. So after the second hike I decided it was finally time to buy a GPS. And so I did. Amazon had one of their specials on a Garmin on Tuesday and I snapped it up for $99.99.

It arrived on Friday afternoon. It's very pretty.

As you can see in the picture above, it's a Garmin  nuvi 855. Touchscreen, talks to you, and even has voice recognition too. Gotta love it.

I used it for the first time today while driving to Duke Forest for some hiking and it was great. I wish I'd bought one of these gadgets years ago.

I've never used one before so I don't know which features they all have and which ones aren't standard. I really liked having the posted speed and my actual speed right there on the display. It makes keeping track of the speed issue very easy. Showing what turn is coming up next is great too. I do love toys!

Comments

Scarlet said…
Oh my goodness! What a gadget??!!
Whatever happened to the old days of pulling over to the side of the road and flicking through the street directory?!
10:01 PM
Teresa said…
LOL. We've used GPS a lot and it really does help when you don't know where you are going. But they tend to be bossy and ignore the fact that roads are closed. Hit a detour and the thing goes nuts, demanding that you turn around! The voice even tells you where to turn around, but gets quite insistent about it. hehehe.

One particular trip back from my brother's house we didn't want to go on route 78 because it was under construction and messy and nothing we told the GPS would get it to reroute away from 78. We finally turned it off, headed in the direction we thought we should go to avoid 78. Later when we turned it on to be routed home, it took us back to 78 -- towards the end of the 78 section, but the thing was totally obsessed with that route!

Still, it was a godsend for when my brother-in-law was helping Walter move into his condo in the center of Philadelphia -- it knew that you couldn't take the same roads out of the city than you could into the city.
4:38 PM
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