Maps v. GPS's

Karen and I have this ongoing debate about whether maps or GPS's are more useful.  Being the Luddite that I am, it's easy to figure out which I prefer.  Given Karen's technological skills and her admittedly weak map-reading talents, she clearly opts for the GPS's.  There are arguments in favor of both, but I'm arguing in favor of the old fashioned map, especially after a couple of traveling hiccups we had over the holidays.

The first was relatively benign.  En route to Karen's sister's house for a family Christmas get-together, I was fairly certain that I knew how to get to her house once we got off the expressway.  I didn't remember the names of the streets, and in that regard the GPS helped.  But when we came to where we should have turned west, the GPS told us to turn east.  I was suspicious the minute I heard the command to turn east, but I was certain when I heard that we would be arriving in two hundred and fifty feet...which put us smack-dab in the middle of farmland with no houses within three hundred yards of our location.  Even Karen knew something was wrong.  Without referring to a map, I turned us around, headed in the direction I remembered and found her house.

We should have known something was amiss when we went to Ohio to pick up Karen's aunt for Christmas. Weather conditions were fine, so we can't blame atmospherics for what happened.  Rhoda, as Karen affectionately called her GPS (because guides us on the roads...get it?), went dead.  We couldn't get a picture on the thing to save our lives.  So Karen turned to her phone, her alternate GPS, which had some app that was going to guide us to her aunt's house in place of Rhoda.

I'd looked at a map to see what route to take there and clearly remembered the number of the highway we should have taken.  Glorious technology overruled me and told us to take a different highway -- who am I to argue with technology? -- and off we went on our odyssey.

All that was missing was sirens, a Cyclops and Scylla and Charybdis.  If Karen's aunt were named Penelope she'd have woven enough to cover the entire state of Ohio while she waited for us.  We were supposed to head southeast on the original route as shown to me on the map.  We ended up going east, then north, then north east, then south east, then south and finally southwest.  Yes, one would have thought we were avoiding some humongous natural disaster given the circuitous route we took.

We ventured through towns called Thackery, Mutual and Urbana, the latter of which, being located in Champaign County, threw me for a loop, considering I attended the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana in Champaign County, Illinois.  Given our wanderings, we might could have been back in Illinois for all I knew.  The GPS app took his hither and yon and, wouldn't it just be the case, there was no Ohio map in my car.  We asked for directions in one gas station and got a response that seemed to justify Karen's belief in Ohioans.

An hour and a half behind schedule, we finally trudged into the town where Karen's aunt lives.  We loaded her in the car and began the weary slog home, just two days before Christmas.  The return trip was uneventful, no doubt owing to the fact that we didn't need to resort to any kind of GPS or hand-held device giving us the shortest route home.

In any event, I had more than enough maps of our home state to consult had we gotten lost.

In truth, GPS's can be of inestimable value in certain situations, mostly urban, where the terrain is unfamiliar or confusing, as is the case in cities with numerous one-way streets that turn into two-way streets at certain points.  In towns like Indianapolis, where one highway can actually have nearly ten different route numbers (don't believe me?  check out some of the roads on the eastern side of the city and see how many route numbers some of those byways have...), it can be helpful.  But for as helpful as a GPS can be, it can be horribly confusing, requiring the experience and knowledge of a fighter pilot who's flown for years using a HUD.  When I get a command to take the exit right and keep left, then stay right, after four hours of driving with another four ahead of me, in rush hour traffic, I can get a little testy.  And my idea of fun is not driving in rush hour traffic in dimming light in an unfamiliar city trying to follow all the numbers and directions on a three by five screen.  I'm not a fight pilot, darn it.

So give me a map any day.  If nothing else, my map will never run out of juice that will disable it.

(c) 2014 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles