T i m wrote
Harry Bloomfield 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). ;-)

Well said sir!

Cheers. There aren't many bits of kit that I would say this about
but if I lost my GPS I'd go out and buy a new one ASAP.

I wouldn't and in fact stopped using mine.

I much prefer the phone, because I have that with me all the time,
and it does things much better, particularly with live measured
traffic and stuff like street view that can be handy at times and
being so easy to do proper google searches when the GPS itself
doesn't show you what you want POI wise etc and being able to
just tap on an address in the google hit or an email or facebook
'inbox' and have that auto handed to the mapper which then
directs you to that place etc. And is always completely up to date.

I struggled for many years with paper maps and no
time or knowledge of where I might need to go next.

And that's the thing isn't it. For those who can only envisage the
concept of 'a journey' you plan as if you were going to the North Pole
have never been called mid-journey and asked to go somewhere else
instead / first.

So valuable time was lost, planning a route to
where I needed to be and hoping for the best.

Yup. We did do that when planning a camping trip, but only in
pencil. We could get to a campsite and really like it, stay there
longer than we 'planned' and so cut out a whole section. With
the GPS we just select a previously inputted campsite / waypoint
or just enter the postcode of our new destination.

And when out walking for exercise its handy to just go wherever
looks interesting at the time particularly where you haven't been
before and then just ask it for the best route back to the car etc.

Same with wandering around a city as a tourist, just wander
around what looks interesting and then ask it to show you
the best public transport to get back to where you want to
end up at the end of the day etc. Leaves farting around with
timetables etc for dead.

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.

Similar here. My first GPS, a Garmin GPS III+ only had direction and
distance from the destination but even that was better than any
map when you didn't know where you were in the first place. ;-)

I saw the possibilities, so bought one of the early
Garmin self contained units, able to plot a route.

I think I got that with my GPS V.

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.

Perfect / brilliant.

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.

Yup, I now have a Garmin Nuvi 215 for car / pocket use and a Garmin
Quest for use on the motorbikes / cycles (24hr rechargeable battery
life and fully waterproof).

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.

Absolutely. I wouldn't do any real 'off road' stuff by relying
on the GPS alone and find it reasonably interesting getting
an overview from a nice map.

I don't bother with maps at all anymore even tho I still have them.

Much prefer to use google earth etc now.

I also still buy the 'new' AA big road atlas's you see on sale
in petrol stations for 99p or so (and often one for each car,
'just in case') but I've also stuck quite a few in recycling a
year later completely un-referenced. ;-(

I havent bothered for decades now.

However, the biggest plus for the GPS by far is the amount of
rows it saved between me and her when it came to navigating.

Yeah, that's what a mate of mine says too,
by far the best way to avoid arguments.

I'm driving because I can generally 'get on with it', prefer to drive
than be driven and am happy to drive under all conditions.

So, we get a phone call mid journey, requesting we divert somewhere
we don't know. So, I'd sling the map in her lap and that's when I could
sense the tension changing. 'She's not wearing the right glasses for
map-reading' ... 'it makes her feel sick' ... 'can't you stop and do it'
...
and doesn't seem to want to swap roles so that I can do the map
reading because 'it's dark'. ;-(

When I got the GPS she would remind *me* to bring it with us
because she knew just how much easier it made both our lives. ;-)

With GPS's as cheap, capable and user friendly as they are now
I really don't know why anyone (who ever drives further than Tescos
and back) doesn't have one ... unless they are Luddites that is. ;-)

I do know one who not only doesn't have a gps, doesn't even have
a mobile phone either and does do quite a bit of long distance stuff.
He doesn't use maps either, does it all in his head and by word of mouth.

When his car key broke he had to use mine to ring his
wife to get her to come into town with the spare car key.
And I had to dial the number too, he couldn't even do that.

(And having one on a phone or built into the car also counts).