I Love My GPS!

I never thought I'd say it, but paper maps aren't the best way to travel.
There, I said it.

I'm a map guy. The bigger the better. In college, I used to tack US Forest Service maps on the wall in my office. They extended up onto the ceiling and down to the floor. After college, I worked as a biologist on a fishing trawler in the Bering Sea in Alaska. We had a Global Positioning System device on board, which basically tracked our position all over the open sea. It was a strange new device that cost a ton, but was worth it for fishing boasts in one of the most dangerous places on earth.

The GPS device we had on the Northwest Enterprise didn't have a little map; it simply told us our longitude and latitude which we used to plot our location on the charts. Fast forward twenty years, GPS devices are available in cell phones. My how times have changed.

But I'm a map guy. As useful as a GPS was on a fishing boat a hundred miles from land, I simply couldn't see the value in a teeny screen with a teeny map on it. Until Tinsley bought one for me for Christmas. For fun, I punched in a few addresses and had the device lead me around town, which seemed pretty useful. But the other night I had to attend a dinner party for work. It was a dark and foggy night and the house was on a skinny country road in west Connecticut. There was no way I could possibly read the street signs , mailbox numbers, or even see the lines on the road for that matter. But my new Magellan Maestro 3100 brought me there and home without a hitch.

I'll still use a road atlas for the big picture, but when I get to the city, or town, and need to find a particular address, I'll flip on my GPS and set my mind at ease. It even has little icons that point out gas stations, banks, and grocery stores.

I'm sold. Buy one.