While we saw many spectacular sights and experienced many interesting things on our recent vacation, the biggest hit was a piece of technology we bought to assist us. Convinced after taking my friend Bill's GPS unit for a test-drive, we decided that if we were going to get a GPS, it made sense to get it before we went on a long drive to Canada and back. (I wish we had made that same decision in acquiring passports, but that's another issue.)
After some research, I purchased from Best Buy the Garmin Streetpilot c330, which comes pre-loaded with maps of America and Canada. What a great purchase.
One of the cool things about this unit is that its crisp female voice speaks in about a dozen languages, including American English and British English. We set it on British English because it sounded infinitely cooler (duh). The unit was soon dubbed "J.K.".
By now we know the route from DC to Indiana by heart, so we didn't really need J.K. for navigation, but she turned out to be really useful in locating a gas station ahead when we were in danger of running empty. It's actually kind of exciting to hear her count down the miles to go when you know the engine can conk out at any second for want of fuel. And while she was very helpful in helping us find a hotel for the night, she would have been even more useful had we noticed that all her business entries include a phone number to call ahead and check for vacancies.
After a week in Indiana, we spent the night in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I went to law school and where Carol and I lived right after we got married. J.K. helped us find some local sights (Cottage Inn and Domino's Farms) we had long forgotten how to find. When we started for Canada, we just told J.K. to take us to our hotel in Toronto, and she directed us all the way to the entrance.
Only twice did we have any issues with her performance. Curiously, she failed to have in her database several long-time Elkhart restaurants located right near the Indiana Toll Road. We know how to get there anyway, but the omission of the restaurants was strange.
The second issue arose when we were desperately low on fuel as we left the hotel in Toronto. (Yes, we almost ran out of gas TWICE on this vacation. Sorry about that.) For some reason, convenience stores in Toronto are listed in J.K.'s database as gas stations. We spent at least 20 minutes driving around Toronto following false leads, looking for a gas station with no luck. After stopping in frustration and then checking out the Royal Ontario Museum, a helpful doorman pointed us to the nearest fueling station.
As we left Niagara, J.K. took us on the quickest route south through New York and Pennsylvania without a hitch. If we made a wrong turn, which we did a couple of times because of pilot error (stupid pilot!), she recalculated and got us right back on course.
Carol had printed out multiple maps on Mapquest before we left. We didn't need a single one.
As I said, J.K. was the hit of our vacation.
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