Vacation-proven GPS navigation tips
My wife and I recently took a much needed, long-awaited, week-long vacation to sunny St. Petersburg, Florida. We rented a Nissan Murano and borrowed a Garmin nuvi 660 portable GPS navigation system--the widescreen version of the top-rated Garmin nuvi 350--from the office for our exploits. Most of our trips were centered on finding various places to buy food or eat food, thanks to my wife's surfing of Chowhound's forums.
Although I was quite familiar with the area (I used to test lawn mowers there for CR for several weeks each winter), it turned out that having the navigation system was a big help. That said, it wasn't exactly flawless. Oftentimes, navigation system effectiveness, and your satisfaction, hinges on working out how best to search the database to program your desired destination, and how easy it is to navigate the system's software. (The Garmin's programming is very simple.) With that in mind, here are a few tips from my experiences on our trip:
1) Sometimes less information is more: Many systems suggest that you only type in the root name of a street. For example, instead of entering "West Bay Drive," all you should enter is Bay. The system will then list all of the options, usually including the full street name you wanted. Entering "West Bay Drive" sometimes resulted in the system not finding this major street.
2) Actual addresses are helpful in vacation planning: It helps to have the full mailing address of a destination. Often entering an address is more straight-forward than searching the name of a location in the points-of-interest database. Consider including a list of addresses in your pre-vacation planning and even pre-programming the unit.
3) Don't forget the cord: With an internal battery, you can usually get four or more hours of cable-free use and reduce cable clutter on the dash. Running on battery power was great on the flight down, allowing me to use the unit as a MP3 player with headphones. But the cord is useful for recharging, and you'll need it when the battery does die down. An unforeseen advantage: the FM transmitter that broadcasts directions and MP3 music was stronger when we used the DC power instead of the battery. (It was still hard finding a clear frequency in the radio-station-rich Tampa area.)
The nuvi's long cord proved helpful; we could leave it plugged into the 12-volt power port inside the center console compartment and still reach the dashboard. Like many cars nowadays, the Murano's console had a small groove allowing you to route the cord out of the closed compartment. This makes storage when parking a cinch--just detach the mount and plop the whole thing in the compartment, out of sight from thieves.
4) Think of other ways to search: While visiting a small town, we wanted to find a hole-in-the-wall local fish sandwich place. We knew it was across the street from the public library, and found was quicker to search for the nearest library than to enter the name of the eatery.
5) Don't throw out your maps: Now, don't take this the wrong way--navigation systems often work really well. But even with a big screen, it's hard to get the big picture of which way your route is going to take you. A map--even the big-scale ones from the rental car company--can help you decide if the route plotted by the nav system makes sense. Remember that while navigation systems almost always get you to where you want to go, they're not a substitute for local knowledge, nor can they put directions into context, like avoiding Main Street in any small town on morning of the 4th of July. While searching out a lunch stop by using the navigation system, we didn't realize that we were right around the corner from several places we wanted to stop--a bungle that would have been avoided if we had cross-checked the map.
Read our complete guide to portable car GPS navigation systems.
