charmin garmin

Our neighbor Rick recently bought a new truck and an off market Garmin navigation system. His brother George is on vacation for a few months so we’ve started taking Rick out to dinner with us. The other day he suggested we take his truck so we would see how nice it is and also get to see the Garmin in action. To make the event complete, we accessed the “food” selection on the Garmin and looked for a new place. We found one called Blue Forrest Water Company and told the nav system to take us there. It’s one of those that gives voice directions as well as displaying a map. It did a fine job for the first 10 miles. At that point we were in the middle of a conversation when the nav voice told us to make a turn. We missed it. Miss Garmin immediately told us to hang loose that she was figuring a new route. This new route took us through a housing development with hundreds of streets and turns. They came up so fast that Rick missed half of them – in engineering terms, the calculation time for the Garmin was longer than the drive time to the new solution – and the poor gal was having to constantly recalculate a new path. If the unit had been equipped with a hand, no doubt she would have reached out and grabbed Rick by the throat but she remained calmer than we did. In retrospect she needed to say “ yo, Rick – stop and give me a minute here to get us out of this mess”. We managed to finally get out of the development and onto the road we had initially missed. She said to stay on the road for 1.8 miles and then turn onto Green Dairy Road. We went right past Green Dairy Road even though she was telling us to turn. The reason for that is that the road is only a hundred yards or so before a stop light and we all assumed the stop light was at Green Dairy Road. U-turn. Green Dairy Road is a very narrow, but paved road. It didn’t have a sign so the only way we really knew we were on the right road was by looking at the displayed map. She told us to go 1.x miles and turn right onto West Kentucky. West Kentucky was paved to the left but a dirt road to the right. By now we’re fairly certain that this new restaurant was going to be very interesting and that we wouldn’t have a traffic problem. After several hundred yards the width of the dirt road was such that trees were going to scratch the sides of the truck and it started looking very soft. We backed out which gave Miss Garmin more headaches. We gave up on the Water Company and decided she wasn’t a good source of restaurant leads. We gave it another chance by plugging in a place we knew was in downtown Deland and let her guide us out. She did but not without one more hitch in the getalong. She took us back using the paved section of West Kentucky and telling us to turn left at CR4209 or some number like that. Turns out that 4209 is Plymouth Ave but there were certainly no 4209 signs. We all knew that Plymouth was where we wanted to turn and the visual said to turn. We went straight to downtown Deland from that point and faked her out one more time with a change in our restaurant selection. It was a fun trip but took us three times as long as it should have. My favorite part was that once we missed that first turn, about every 3 minutes or so Miss Garmin would chime in and advise us that there is a better route than the one we chose. If I could, I’d have returned the throat clutch onto Miss Garmin.