On a recent trip to Boston, I decided to add a GPS to my rental car. Although I'm great with direction and finding my way via a paper map, I had to drive about an hour outside of town -- at night -- and I figured having a satellite-based mapping system on my side would be a good thing. How wrong I was. I've never been so lost in my life.
I should have know it was going to be a disaster from the moment I tried to leave the airport. The correct highway onramp was right there in front of me, but so was a copy car and a slew of flashing lights barring access. Did the GPS know about this? Of course not. Not only did it want me to drive over a cop car to get on the highway, every time I followed the detour signs and was getting somewhere, the GPS would redirect me back to the same, closed-off entrance. I went in a big fat circle at least three times before I purposely got so lost that the GPS was forced to look for another entrance.
Sure, it found a new entrance -- actually about four of them -- but that still didn't help. The GPS became very fond of sending me through the Big Dig tunnels all over Boston. What happens when you go in a tunnel? The satellite connection fails of course! I would be driving along, needing to choose which direction to take out of the tunnel, and my GPS would disconnect. Of course, I almost always took the wrong direction because the GPS doesn't tell you where you will eventually be going, it just tells you where to turn and when.
Another problem in Boston is that each tunnel road also has a corresponding side road not in the tunnel. Can the GPS tell these apart? Of course not. It would tell me to take the road on the right when it actually meant the tunnel road on the left. So the next time I would reach one of these tunnel and side road choices I'd say "o.k., I really need to take the tunnel instead." ...and then it would turn out I was supposed to take the side road after all, so I could make a left turn over the tunnel. Argh!
It took more than an hour just to get on the freeway that night. I drove through some pretty cool looking parts of Boston, I just have no idea where they were! I do know I was in the vacinity of Fenway park at one point, so at least I got to salute the World Series-winning Sox the day after their big win.
You think the return trip would have been better...by then I'd figured out some of the foibles of the GPS and was learning to compensate. But oh no, I still got lost trying to get back into the airport. This time, the problem was street names. The GPS would tell me to "stay right and enter the McKinley (or whatever) highway" but there wouldn't be any such highway. There might be the 93 or the 1 or the Americas Avenue, but heaven help me, there was no McKinley highway to be found.
At least by now I was quicker on the uptake. After only one missed highway, I gave up on the GPS and resorted to that good ol' standby, the directional sign...you know, the signs with that nifty airplane symbol? Yeah, the ones that take you to the airport if you just follow the little picture. Much better than a GPS.
And for other locations? I'm sticking with the archaic paper map.
Happy driving!
