Common sense is lacking in a lot of folks. GPS is a tool to help you find a destination. Many drivers fail to think and validate what is comes from the GPS. Every year news has stories about people that drive off a cliff or in to a lake following GPS directions. Map reading is an exotic skill these days.
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Yep, map reading is lost today.
We took a trip to Ireland last year and we spent a couple of weeks driving around in one small area in the western part of the country. We flew in to Dublin, picked up a rental car and used it for the time in the country. Ireland is one of the worst and most expensive places to rent a car. We took all of the insurance, including broken windshield insurance based on what we had read, and we are glad we did, since we were not in the car more than and hour or two, when we went through an area where the road was being tarred and graveled and a truck heading in the opposite direction put a rock in the windshield which then cracked.
One of the up charges on the car rentals is having the car GPS turned on.
I think it was $10 a day. :shocked: The plan had been to pick up a sim card at the airport but that did not happen even though we had a 3-4 hour trip, if we did not get lost, driving the back roads from Dublin to where we were staying. However, I had bought, not one but two, different road atlases, one of which was updated and published just before we left home. We had spent quite a bit of time on Google Earth/Map studying the are we were staying, the problem was getting there. :laughing::laughing::laughing: Seemed simple enough. However, one important road sign was not quite right. We were on the M50, which is the highway that goes around Dublin, and we needed to get on the M3, which is the highway that goes across Ireland and eventually turns into the N3 which then goes into Northern Ireland. We saw the sign for the N3 which was really the M3 so we missed the turn. Should have figured it out but we only had a couple of seconds and I just went straight.
We did turn off on the M4 exit, which is just a short drive from the M3, and the M4 would take us to where we were staying but it would take longer. So we pulled out one of the atlases and started figuring out how to get from the M4 back to the M3. The M50 is like a wheel around Dublin with the M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, etc, highways going out like spokes on a wheel. All we had to do was go a short distance on the back roads from the M4 to get to the M3. Which is what we did and had a blast driving down very pretty country roads/lanes.
If we had had GPS, it is very unlikely that we would have missed the M3 turn, but then we would have missed some pretty back roads driving.
Twas all a good adventure. The only bad thing about the missed turn was that it cost us about an hour which was a bit much since we had been traveling for about 24 hours or so. But it was worth it.
We eventually got sim cards at our destination but never really used them to navigate around the rural area we were in. Just used the atlases. Many of the roads could barely be called roads since they were only single lane. Now, these roads have been in existence for a very long time, so they should be on the GPS maps, but I would have been very nervous blindly following GPS on those roads.
GPS has sent us, or tried to send us, on routes that were not best, more times than I can count.
Later,
Dan
