I found a little time to update the blog tonight and I found this long lost post from a couple weeks ago that apparently I never published. I don't know if I thought it needed tweaking or what, but whatever...
It used to be when we'd take a trip that we had to plan most everything ahead of time...
We'd print a map to our hotel...
We'd look up area restaurants and print out maps...
We'd look up area attractions and print out maps...
You get the point.
Navigation has changed our lives--especially our travels.
(Yeah, we know... We're technologically delayed.)
We've taken a couple road trips lately, and guess what? Not a single map was printed. And for the most part, it's been great. We decide what kind of food we're hungry for, look for the nearest restaurant location, and press the little navigation icon. And, it guides us right into the parking lot...most of the time.
There was one night on our trip when we wanted to visit an outlet center near Wisconsin Dells. I made the mistake of typing in the name of the store I wanted to visit and the name of the town that we thought the outlet center was in... Apparently, it didn't recognize the business name so we proceeded to drive 15 miles directly into the middle of main street in Baraboo, WI where it said that we had reached our destination. Hmm...not exactly what we had in mind. So, I looked up the outlet center by name instead, but by this time, we were cutting it really close on time. We raced the 15 miles back to the Interstate and it says, "Your destination is on the right." And it was. But the exit was behind us. Grr! After all this, we realized that the outlet center was only about a mile from our hotel in the first place. If we'd just looked at a map, we would have known this...
On the way home, it was amusing to drive through construction zones where our route was altered. Sometimes, our little arrow would be driving around the ditch on the screen. Another time, there was a highway bypass and the map showed us driving east in the westbound lane. Strangely, the program never said anything when we went off course. We decided that the navigation is far too polite for its own good.
We thought it would have been a whole lot more fun if you could choose your "navigation personality".
A hillbilly voice could be like, "Well, I never! Y'all drove off the road back thar! Git back on the road before ya get yerself killed, ya hear?"
Or, you could have a sarcastic New Yorker, "Uh, excuse me, when did I tell you to leave the road? Get back on the right side of the road if you prefer to live..."
Or, you could have a navigation geek, "We have evidence to suggest that you have driven off course. In a minority of cases, this can be fatal. Please proceed back to the proper lane of traffic to ensure safe arrival at your destination."
Hard to believe such a thing doesn't already exist... Maybe there's an app for this that we've not yet discovered. :-)
Anyway, speaking of GPS... This reminds me of a comedy segment we saw awhile back on this subject that's pretty funny and I thought I'd share it:
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