"Harry Bloomfield" wrote in message
. uk...
T i m submitted this idea :
Now, if you don't actually crawl out from under your stone very often
or aren't someone who likes doing stuff in the moment, 'planning' a
route 3 weeks in advance could be considered the fun bit of any trip
(till the first road closure of course). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

Well said sir!

I struggled for many years with paper maps and no time or knowledge of
where I might need to go next. So valuable time was lost, planning a route
to where I needed to be and hoping for the best.

I grabbed a satnav GPS receiver, just as soon as they became available so
as to see what use they could be, with its output fed into an early green
screen laptop to work out a route.

I saw the possibilities, so bought one of the early Garmin self contained
units, able to plot a route. At the time, I was working at several fixed
locations, several hundreds of them, so I fed these in to the unit. The
nature of the job meant I might be needed to get from where I was, to one
of the other locations fast, no time to look at a paper map. I found it to
be absolutely superb, just pick where I needed to be from the named points
in my list.

My present SatNav system, now used entirely for leisure, is linked to RDS
and the Internet, so it gets constant updates on road conditions, flooded
roads etc. and can route around them.

Yes I can use a map and do so, but not for route navigation anymore. It
gets opened once I arrive at my destination, to see what is around the
area.

I don't bother with a paper map for that anymore either, use google maps
most of the time or google earth when out in the scrub outside built up
areas.