Do you use a GPS navigator in your car? It’s cool, right? You can be totally unfamiliar with a route or in an unfamiliar city and get step-by-step instructions on where to turn to get to your destination.
But sometimes, those GPS directions can take you down a path that maybe wasn’t such a good idea. Like when the most direct route actually takes you down a muddy logging road. Or when you inadvertently enter your destination as Windsor Ontario, instead of Windsor, Nova Scotia. And that’s where we’re looking for your help.
Have you ever been misdirected with your GPS? Tell us those embarrassing, amusing or even triumphant tales of GPS woes.
In Canada, call us toll free at 1-877-34-SPARK (1-877-347-7275). Outside Canada is 1-416-205-7021.
You can also send an email to spark@cbc.ca.
Happy trails!
original image by Kentfield
I downloaded the inexpensive Roadee GPS app for my iPhone a few months ago, and thought I'd see what sort of directions it gave me in Vancouver, my hometown — always a good way to see if a GPS routefinder knows what it's doing.
I asked for a route in my house in Burnaby (a Vancouver suburb) to a pub in North Vancouver (another suburb), which is just across Burrard Inlet, a drive of about 15 minutes and 15 km across the Second Narrows Bridge:
http://is.gd/ckIlG
Instead of that route, Roadee directed me to take the Trans-Canada Highway east and north, then through Lillooet, along the Duffy Lake Road to Pemberton, south through Whistler and Squamish and back to North Vancouver. That route is about 600 km and would take all day:
http://is.gd/ckIhB
It seemed not to know that there are bridges across Burrard Inlet, as there have been since the 1930s.
A few years ago I drove to LA from Montreal for a job. I had a GPS for my way down there and it was pretty good at navigating through the the small towns, but pretty useless when it came to the long stretches of highway.
A few months into my time in LA, my GPS was stolen via a broken car window. As unhappy as I was in the moment, I realized later that I came to rely on it too much. So for the rest of my time in LA (a very car-centric city) I relied on my analog NFT book to get me everywhere. After that, I drove up to Victoria, then to St. John’s with only the sun to guide us and didn’t get lost once (well, we missed the exit to Saint John…)
The bad thing about the GPS (at least when I had one) was the Points of Interest. It could tell you where all the fast food places are, or Walmarts, and perhaps some local places (by name only) but nothing else, which usually makes you default to ‘sure things’ like Starbucks. But of course, that’s where talking to locals come in… and Yelp.
We set out from Toronto to go to our friends' cottage near North Bay. My GPS faithful husband decided to work out the latitude and longitue of the end location as opposed to following the emailed directions. There was no official address for the cottage. Hours later with sundown lurking ahead, one cantankerousanally retentive cat, a carload of groceries and every flesh hungry bug zooming around out car, my husband turned on a road that looked suspect. We arrived at the proverbial fork in the road. Shouldn't the "Use at your own risk" sign have been a tip off? According to hubby, "the GPS says so." As the sun waned away, we felt the car, a rented Prius I might add, landed in a ditch. The wheels spun and we were in so deep, the car tilted on it's left side. There was no way we were going anywhere soon. Husband tried to get reception on his phone but I think the thickness of the noseeums caused interference. We eventually managed to get through to a towing company but, surprise, we couldn't tell them where we were! Give them the latitude and longitude, I suggested. Con't
Brigitte, CON'T
After about 20 minutes with the cat and me growing increasingly restless, we saw two young men walking the path with beer in hand. Was this "Deliverance" – and you can take that any way you want.
Actually, they were very sweet. The one guy said he had brought the other fellow to show him where people had gotten stuck a couple of months back! I guess they must have had a GPS too. The guys lifted our car out of the ditch and guided us out to the main road. We eventually made it to our friends' cottage and on our return, we made sure to mail a gift certificate for the beer store our rescuers for the next time they went hunting for stranded GPSers!
While I don't have any funny stories to share, I did want to add my 2 cents about something closely related to the topic. I use my iphone often to plot routes to places and what I have noticed is that I tend to pay more attention to the directions from the device than surveying the route itself, so when it comes to returning there a second time I don't recall the route nearly as well as I did back in the day when you had no choice but to really pay attention to landmarks/shops in order to remember your route.
I have the exact same experience.
A couple of years ago I used a GPS to map a route from my home in Toronto to a cottage my family had rented in Bancroft. The GPS did a relatively good job, until we got into "the boonies". The GPS ended up taking me on a steep, off-road trail that was certainly NOT meant for a regular vehicle. It was muddy, and full of huge rocks. I was driving a rental car at the time and my heart nearly stopped at least a dozen times when I heard the bottom of the car scrape across boulders. We passed by two guys on the side of this "road" who were both driving ATVs. They looked at myself and my girlfriend driving our Pontiac G5 as though we were maniacs.
When driving in areas like that, I will never rely on a GPS again.
the biggest reason why people find their way faster with a map, rather than a gps: is because they have been around longer. Gps: 2002, lets say. Paper map: umm…what explorer of the seas did not use a map?