Honeymoon Road Trip Part 8: GPS- A Tech that Works!

Two years ago, my dad bought a GPS for his truck. No one is really sure why. It's true that my dad is a sucker for new technology that promises a high rate of return in the Practical World. But a GPS? In the car? For my Dad? His eyesight, although at one time of Zeiss-lens quality, has slowly descended to trifocals. His grasp of tech devices is sketchy and he is highly susceptible to distraction while driving (There are numerous, documented reports of Dad driving the family off the road as he tried to figure out whether the tiny, white dots on a distant mountainside were, in fact, mountain goats or merely patches of snow). Only my dad's lack of computer skills has prevented him from learning the GPS sufficiently to get him killed on the first outing. Thus, the GPS languished in the original box until this road trip came along.

Damn, was it awesome! I had never used a GPS before. I didn't understand the GPS coordinates I saw on maps. I had no interest in having a GPS. I didn't need a GPS. When, I get a car and move away from New York, I'm getting a GPS. The data isn't complete, but it's a fantastic way to map directions to National Monuments, Parks, and tourist attractions. In many areas of the country, it provided great directions to gas stations and hotels. Whenever I was having a hard time finding a restaurant or hotel in one of our travel guides, I could type it into the GPS and, 80% of the time, find it. When we mapped in an address and followed the route, the GPS ticked off the time and distance to our destination- no more ambiguity about how much further it was. For a person who has spent his entire life traveling from one corner of this country to another, the GPS is a watershed.

Using a GPS is, however, a two-person job. On a GPS-enhanced road trip, it is no longer the passenger's job to navigate the vehicle via a road atlas.. it is to prevent the driver from killing everybody while staring at the GPS. It's hypnotic. You watch your little icon inch across a map in real-time as a stiff-yet-feminine voice issues orders, "In Two. Hundred. Feet. Turn Left." Early on, Kat had to issue a Decree to ban all programming or button-pushing from the driver's seat position. Programming directions usually involved Kat pulling the GPS to her side of the dashboard and angling it so I couldn't watch her rifling through menus. Over the course of the trip, I became especially obsessed with the altitude readouts. By the time we reached Rocky Mountain National Park, Kat had to drive whenever we were in the mountains because I kept announcing every time we climbed or fell another 1,000 feet while Kat kept her eye on the precipice that beckoned off the edge of the road.

As invaluable as the GPS was on this journey, be warned that the technology is not infallible. There were a few incidents where technology failed us, though we managed to get by. In Iowa, the GPS ordered us to use every ramp of a cloverleaf to merge onto another highway, instead of using the first ramp we came across. In New Mexico, the GPS Mistress ordered us "In One. Hundred. Feet. Turn Right" when there was, in fact no road to take. Not many of the smaller campgrounds are listed in the system's directory, either, so Kat and I were often reduced to hard-copy maps to find a place to stay for the night. There was also an incident in Utah where the device failed us completely and threatened to derail our Happy Honeymoon Road Trip... but that's a story for Part 13 of this journey.