posted by Evi on Oct 9
A couple of weeks ago my husband, Bill, and I decided to take a drive up to Mount Dora in our adopted state of Florida. My brother had stopped there on one of his trips down and told us that Mount Dora was a real town with streets where you could actually walk from shop to shop, to restaurants, and a scenic lake, unlike our strip mall-littered neck of the woods. So, I made reservations at the Hampton Inn near there (very clean, by the way) and off we went.
Anyway, Bill is a firm believer in GPS systems whereas I love maps. I like to see how far we’ve come and how much more of the trip is left. I follow our route town by town, county by county. I feel naked without a map on my lap. Not only that but our last experience with GPS (the one on my cell phone) turned a straightforward 10 minute drive using back roads into a 45 minute ordeal on I-95 and a variety of local heavily trafficked roads.
I already had our excursion to Mount Dora more or less planned out on the map while Bill fiddled around with the GPS mounted on his dashboard. After a couple of swerves off the road I finally said, “Alright, you wanna use the GPS, then use the damn GPS. Just get your hands off of it and let me do it.”
The first GPS inspired turn headed us off in a direction totally opposite of where we wanted to go. After several miles driving along an endless and deserted country road , I finally snapped.
“Turn around, already, and get back on the road we were on!” So he did and once again we were merrily headed toward our destination.
Not having learned a lesson from this, Bill decided to try the GPS again and turned off course, this time onto a road that my map showed as having ended at this spot. Okay, okay, so my map was a few years old and the new portion of the road hadn’t been built yet. So the GPS picked up the continuation of the road . But that’s not the point, since I hadn’t planned on going this route anyway. So here we were on a nice new highway sailing along until. . . toll booth number one. A dollar later, we were back on our way until. . . toll booth number two. A dollar later, we were back on our way again until. . . toll booth number three. A dollar later, we were back on our way again, me now bitching about how we should have just gone as I had originally planned. Fortunately for my husband, the road ended and there were no more toll booths. We exited and used the map the rest of the way. Our trip back from Mount Dora went a bit more smoothly as we put the GPS to rest and did it my way.
Just recently we traded in my car for a new car and guess what freebie came with the car. . . why a GPS system, of course.
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