Before embarking on last month’s road trip, we purchased a TomTom global navigation system.
For the past decade, the bulk of my trips have been the fly/rental car variety. Increasingly in the past years, my cars have come equipped with a GPS.
There are few things I hate more than those tiny place-mat maps the Airport car rental places give you.
The only place they have ever successfully steered me is into the freight hangars.
So I took to GPS like a duck to cool, deep puddle and planned on making sure the next car we buy has it factory-installed.
But a portable after-market system in the meantime? Seemed like an unnecessary luxury in this Mapquest world.
Then, the day before embarking on my 10,000-mile boondoggle, my husband came home with a TomTom. Like an adult, I squealed and hopped around the driveway.
The portable system ran us about $300. We chose it over the integrated option with my husband’s Blackberry because, well, I’m the one that does most of the getting lost in this relationship.
The installation was a matter of attaching a suction cup.
With John Cleese telling us to ‘turn left NOW’, off we stepped.
It never occurred to us to check if it would work in Canada. No worries, even in the most rural bits of northern New Brunswick the device knew where to go.
The multiple-stop planning option was outstanding. We were able to integrate all the destinations - client sites, hotels, desired detours - it a single plan. The estimated travel times and on-the-fly recalculations were about 90% correct. Huge improvement over the other systems I’ve used (perhaps a simple matter of the algorithm getting smarter) and Mapquest.
In sum, the gadget steered us faithfully except for some spells where the satellite signal was not available. The maps clear, construction and traffic avoided, and John’s sardonic wit occasionally shining through the basic ‘go here go there’ dialogue. By the end of the trip, we were ‘instrument driving’ - relying on TomTom instead of looking out for upcoming exits or traffic.
The only improvement to our experience (excepting stronger satellites) would have been if we’d paired it with a Bluetooth headset like the one MoGo is rolling out. There were long stretches when it would have been nice to route the sound only to the driver’s ears.
Otherwise, I can heartily recommend this as a Father’s Day gift or just a regular Thursday purchase.
Tags:Bluetooth, Canada, device, gadget, GPS, headset, John cleese, mogo, navigation, recommendation, road gadget, road trip, signal tomtomShare This
