GPS Rocks

I’m in Dallas having all kinds of fun. Driving in Dallas is very (very) frustrating if you’ve never been here before. So when I picked up my rental car and they gave me an option of upgrading to a slightly bigger car with free GPS I did it.

This kicks. You pick your destination, usually by address or intersection. They have other options such as a Yellow Pages lookup but that sucks (we had get a replacement part from a computer store. We looked up CompUSA in the yellow pages and the closest it found was in Louisiana.)

Once it has the destination you are prompted which way to turn, when to enter a highway, or get off the highway. Turn warnings are timely enough to give you time to actually look for the turn (on a highway changes are announced starting at 2 miles out, and repeated occasionally after that)

Accuracy isn’t enough for it to really tell if you’re on a highway or on the access road next to it (I didn’t want to pay the tolls many times so I’d drive the access road the whole way, I kept getting warnings to exit the toll road)

It saves previous destinations so if you’re frequently driving to the same locations it’s easy to enter that point (Hertz doesn’t wipe the previous location entries between renters, so you can see the previous destinations of other renters. I’m going to try and wipe my car before I turn it back in.)

I do like getting lost and driving around randomly (ask for directions? HA! I spit on your directions.) But in a city like Dallas (and when you’re supposed to be working) this isn’t such a hot idea. GPS works great for this.