Talk about The Gadget Panic...driving through a strange city with NO idea how to get to a specific place and the GPS starts bugging out. Luckily, it was just a brief loss of satellite connectivity and we sort of knew it was giving us the wrong directions anyway since you can't really turn left in the middle of a tunnel. But it was enough to make me realize how reliant I'd become on that little talking box stuck to the windshield to tell me how to get from Point A to the rest of the alphabet.
Now that those handy global-positioning systems are pretty affordable for a lot of people ("affordable," meaning that decent ones cost a couple hundred bucks now instead of the equivalent of three car payments), travel can be a lot less worrisome. Just punch in the address, let the receiver find its satellites and calculate the route, and off you go with maps and guided audio directions. You may get a route that sticks to the main roads or isn't very creative, but there's no more flipping through the atlas or coffee-stained map in a panic while trying to drive, either -- and that has to make for a safer highway experience. (Of course, it's still a good idea to keep the hardcopy maps in the car-door pocket just in case.)
On many GPS units, you can even pick the type of voice you want to hear telling you where to go. We use a female British voice on ours, which vaguely sounds like a digitized Dame Judi Dench. (We even named our Garmin Street Pilot "Cecily," since it had a nice English ring to it.) But even GPS units have joined the pop-culture multimedia revolution. TomTom, for example, offers celebrity voices like Burt Reynolds and Mr. T to guide you, and there are GPS boxes can play MP3 music or double as an FM transmitter so you can blast your iPod's playlists through the car radio between turns.
If you're new to the whole GPS thing, sites like GPS Magazine and GPS Review are a good place to read news and reviews of the different receivers and services available. Because if you're thinking of investing in a GPS receiver, a little research can really, er, point you in the right direction.
