Garmin the Magnificent!

I'm giving our new friend Garmin her own blog post! I am such a lover of maps, and so confident of my navigation skills that the idea of satellite navigation, to me was something for wimps. I revelled in hearing stories of people ending up in dead-ends, or the wrong end of town or worse, using sat-navs!! "That'll show 'em", I'd think "should have used a decent map and looked out the window!"
Until last Tuesday that is.
We set out for the mountains, with our course planned on the map: we would take the local road to the I-5 and then take a right after Bakersfield, up the CA-198. True enough. We'd have got there - much later.
The I-5 goes through Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is about 40 miles wide (in my estimation).
We turned on the Garmin, and all was going great until "she" told us to exit to the I-605. We obeyed her!! Then we realised she was diverting us because of traffic conditions ahead!!! We zigged and zagged through LA, on 3 or 4 Interstates and highways, like a breeze, putting our trust in "herself" and being utterly gobsmacked by the fact that somewhere in the sky an eye was monitoring our progress through the city and at the same time monitoring traffic conditions so that we would get out the other side, without delays!!
Once or twice we exited too soon, and instead of screaming and tearing our hair out, we heard the soothing, confident "recalculating", and our litle friend from the sky had us back on track without as much as a tut-tut!
If I was to advise anyone thinking of driving in the US cities, I would say "Invest in a sat-nav!" Luckily for us we were given a loan of one. We might not have got lost without it, (my pride is still hurting!) but it certainly took the pain and panic out of the driving experience - and who wants that? We've had enough of it over the years!!!
Oh and I forgot to mention - when you're running low on petrol, it'll point you t the nearest petrol station. When you're hungry it'll get you to food...... so, so, much more.... we still have to find out....

That's why I had to give herself a whole blogspot!

Whenever we left the car, I popped the little unit into my bag (size of a mobile phone) for safe keeping. Just before we got home yesterday we called in to the supermarket. As I was walking across the carpark, I heard a voice from my bag -  "Turn right at next junction"!!!!!