NY wrote
Clive George wrote
T i m wrote

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). ;-)

I don't use a GPS, and route planning when driving involves getting in
the car, looking at the map and then going. It never seems to be that
hard - even when crossing countries. Granted I normally have a navigator,
but I don't do too badly without one as well.

Depends whether you have the memory of a goldfish or not! I have never
been the sort of person who can look at a map and memorise a route (eg
sequence of road numbers and junctions) for a long journey. I usually
write down the key junctions and stick it on my dashboard to refer to.

Even if you do have a good memory, I'd much rather have the system
tell me which lane I need to be in coming up to complex junctions etc.

And tell me what time I will arrive allowing for the current MEASURED
traffic when I am running very late and can choose to hoon thru
exceeding the speed limit when I choose to do that to get there in time.

My wife has always suffered from car sickness so has found it difficult to
read a map in a car, so her "coping strategy" was to "teach herself"
(how?) to memorise a whole journey - she says that she can "see" the
picture of the map in her memory and can check turnings as she goes
without needing to look at a real map Quite a skill!

Yes, but a decent gps does so much more with routing around traffic
congestion and continuously telling you what time you will arrive etc.

Satnavs are very useful - either for giving you turn by turn instructions
which you follow blindly (though still checking that you don't drive into
a river just because "the satnav told me to", or else to show you your
current location on an OS map so you can make up a route as you go, with
the benefit of always knowing where you are and how far to the turning
that you want to take.

Yeah, its hilarious watching the worst of the dinosaurs making
spectacular fools of themselves denying they are of any use at all.

Plenty did the same thing with mobile phones too.

In fact a mate of mine still refuses to have anything to do with them.

Satnavs are great for giving you the confidence to take roads that you'd
never otherwise take for fear of getting lost in the of nowhere and
thinking "where am I?".

My sense of direction is much better than most people's so I never
have any problem knowing where I am, even without a map or
compass or anything at all, but its silly to claim that satnavs don't
have any value and a good indication of what fools those who do are.