I've been using a Garmin GPSmap 60CSx backpacking GPS on my motorcycle and in my Jeep. The problem is that my beady little penguin eyes just can't see that teensy little screen anymore. Solution: A new motorcycle GPS, the Garmin Zumo 500 Motorcycle Navigator, which also comes with a car cradle w/speaker that'll announce the turns vocally and which will also announce turns via a Bluetooth headset for my helmet. No more need to stare at teensy little screen to know where I'm supposed to be going...
-- Badtux the no-longer-lost Penguin
i used to tell my orienteering pollywog students (in a paraphrase of dan'l boone)
ReplyDeletei've never been lost. not once. not ever. i was kind of confused for a few days, but i knew where i was the whole time. i was right. the. fuck. there.
I'm never lost, it's the location that isn't where it's supposed to be.
ReplyDeleteHeh. In the pre-GPS era I got kinda confused several times, but never to the point of days. I once bashed my way through the woods for a couple of hours because I'd forgotten which way the road was, but that was in a situation where I knew I could just pick a direction and either run into a swamp (in which case it was the wrong direction!) or run into a road.
ReplyDeleteIn the early GPS days when GPS's only showed you lattitude and longitude and were the size of walkie-talkies I once ran my batteries down by accidentally leaving it on overnight (oh, they only ran 8 hours on a set of batteries too) and ended up walking past the trailhead when coming down the wash from Brad's Water through all that !@#$! sawtooth at the mouth (you know where that is) and ended up walking down the wash a ways before I realized it, but all I did was head to the north and scramble up the bank of the wash until I hit the trail and got home safely (obviously!). But I much prefer having a GPS even though I never rely on it working. It makes it much easier to avoid getting confused like the time I got turned around near Peter's Mesa and ended up right back at the spring I'd just left a few hours ago. (I'd not planned to make a 3 day trip of that one, but so it goes :-).
I much prefer having modern GPS's though, because they allow you to easily avoid unwanted delays in your trip caused by getting momentarily confused. And they're getting so good now as to be downright scary...