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I mentioned in a previous post that I bought a GPS for this trip. It is a really cool Garmin Nuvi 260.

I’d been hemming and hawing on buying one for some time, but they were more money than I was comfortable spending for such a seemingly extravagant gaget. I mean, after all, you can use Mapquest or Google Maps for free.

And in fact that is what did on previous trips. I’d spend hours calculating routes on Google Maps and printing them out. Frankly, though, it was a hassle compiling the enormous binders of information. And if you missed a turn, you were stuck and had to pull of the road and consult the atlas to get back on track.

Fortunately, several retailers had recently discounted the Nuvi 260 in an effort to clear out inventory to make way for the 260W, which has a wider screen. So I figured the price isn’t going to get any better.

I settled on the the Nuvi 260 for two reasons:

First, unlike the cheaper models, the 260 actually reads off the street names. So rather than saying “Turn left in .1 miles” it says “Turn left on Main Street in .1 miles”.

Second, Garmin has a tool for Macs and PCs that allow you to upload your own POI (Points of Interest) called, appropriately enough, POI Loader. Here is a page describing the program. Essentially, you can use this tool to augment the internal database of the GPS.

I loaded all the campgrounds into the unit that we’d be staying at on the whole trip.

As a side note, one thing that threw me when I first used the POI Loader program is that you can’t just import a file of locations. The file has to be within a folder, and name of the folder is what shows up in your unit. So I created a folder called “spring 2008 trip - first half”, and within that folder I put the actual data file - list.csv. Also, the list of locations is ordered by what is closest to you relative to your current location. So I had to break up all the locations into two lists - going down and coming back (hence the “first half” in the name) to keep the campgrounds we’d be staying at in the later part of our trip from intermingling with those we’d be staying at first.

Anyway, I got it all in and figured no more paper maps. I have to re-think that now, having tested the unit five times now in real-world conditions.

Test #1

Coming down from Bangor to Foxboro, MA, the unit routed us through Boston by taking us down I-95, then off on to the traffic-packed I-93, which goes through the heart of downtown, and then BACK onto I-95 before dumping us into a rural residential neighborhood with some twists and turns. I was sweating it a bit because I didn’t recognize the road at all (we’d been at this campground before).

The unit announced with great certainty that we had “arrived”, when in fact the driveway to Normandy Farms was still nearly a mile away. Fortunately, there were signs to guide us. I took a new reading of latitude and longitude from the driveway of the campground and adjusted my database (it is Latitude: +42.04159, Longitude: -71.28098, in case you are keeping track).

Turns out last time we’d visited we’d come in from the other direction - down I-495 (the half-loop on the west side of Boston) and two turns off the freeway, which seems a lot simpler to me.

Test #2

We went from Foxboro, MA to Black Bear Campground in Florida, NY. Operated flawlessly and got us there without incident.

Test #3

We went from the campground to dinner and, again, it performed flawlessly.

Test #4

We went from Florida, NY, to the KOA in Coatesville, PA. It seemed to route us through a lot of small towns, down highway 202. I estimate all the stoplights and traffic added at least an hour to the trip. But upon consulting the map, I think 202 was probably the most direct route.

Test #5

This test led to our first fight over directions. We decided to go to dinner at a place advertised on the campground’s flyer; which, of course, had a map on it. Me, placing all my trust in the GPS, left the map behind in the RV. We start out taking a wrong turn. No problem. My trusty GPS announces it is “recalculating” in an attempt to fix my mistake. The “recalculation” takes us onto some back roads that turn into closed roads, and then into one-lane roads. Finally, we get routed to a major highway. But a trip that should have taken 10 minutes (the restaurant was 3.8 miles away from the campground) has now taken 30 minutes. And the restaurant was closed, to boot, when we finally got there.

Angie is, of course, silently steaming at this point because I’ve placed so much trust in this gadget rather than a map. I point out that a map wouldn’t have changed the fact that the restaurant was closed. Of course with that statement I walked right into a major faux pas that any married man with experience should know - pointing out the error in a wife’s logic AFTER she is already mad. We left the restaurant, followed the way home we should have followed there, and ate leftovers.

Even with all the problems, I still have faith in the GPS. Angie, of course, will be second-guessing it for the remaining 7 weeks of the trip. It is the little fights that make marriage fun.

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