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Buying Guide: Have GPS, Will Travel
Contents
- Have GPS, Will Travel
- Another Option
- Getting There
I have a healthy relationship with my wife. We laugh and work together, occasionally argue, and bicker with almost charming regularity. One of our favorite bickering subjects is technology: my insistence on the use of it and her insistence that technology is not always the answer.
This has resulted in some amusing moments, like the time we argued in front of a brand-new accountant over whether or not we should use TurboTax software to do our taxes. This was more than a decade ago, a time when, as good as TurboTax and its cousin TaxCut were even then, they still made mistakes.
This Sturm und Drang is also the seed of an ongoing battle over how we plan our long drives to my brother-in-law's house in Virginia, yearly camping trips in New Jersey or Connecticut, and the semiregular trips to my mother-in-law in upstate New York. Virtually none of these excursions are journeys into the unknown. We always have a general idea of the main highways, but we're often tripped up figuring out the right combinations of interchanges, bridges, and exits to use. Even with large maps unfolded on our laps, we make mistakes.
Almost as soon as MapQuest appeared on the Internet, I began trying to use it to plan trips long and short. We discovered early on that MapQuest is a powerful, yet dumb, service. It knows the way, but is often missing little nuances about the way a road forks, or it will offer a route that may get you to your destination, but drags you through the heart of a city to do so. I can put up with these minor annoyances, but my wife cannot. She is the yin to my yang. So, I finally gave up on MapQuest to put aside at least one bickering point.—Continue reading...