I’m spoiled by my GPS. How did we ever find our way around before these infernal contraptions were foisted on us by the electronics manufacturers?
I own six of the things, but four of them are pretty much just for hiking and hunting. I can plot waypoints on them, but that doesn’t do you a lot of good if the road doesn’t go in a straight line from one waypoint to the next. The fifth one is my running GPS, and it’s really designed to tell you where you’ve been, not where you’re going.
The sixth one is my travel companion. I haven’t gone anywhere without it for probably 18 years. Unfortunately, 18 years is an eternity for an electronic gadget. It finally chirped its last turn-by-turn direction about a week before I went to Vegas.
I figured I’d be fine. I mean, people used to navigate by nothing more than the stars. I have my phone, and it has several GPS apps, so how lost could I get? Turns out, I could get plenty lost. I’ve used my phone to navigate around Wyoming and even down in Denver, but the roads in Vegas are much more crowded, and some of them go over or under other roads – roads my phone thought I was on. Several times, I realized the phone was trying to get me to veer off to the left, but the road I was on only went to the right. It was the road I was underneath that hooked off to the left.
How do we let ourselves get so sucked in by this technology? It was a wake-up call for me. I realized on that trip that I need to leave the GPS at home on purpose next time I go somewhere new. I need to reacquaint myself with a map and compass. Or at the very least figure out how to work my stupid phone.
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