Our GPS

Poor Nikki has been adding so much to the blog!! I should add something, and for once it won't entail a battle map lol.

One big thing that i don't think we even mentioned regarding our camping/road trip was that we rented a GPS system with our rental car. That little thing amazed us and we used it for absolutely everything. We hardly picked up a map and it made navigating a breeze, allowing us to concentrate on the sites.

After getting back we were determined to get our own GPS. SOOOoooo after a bit of researching on my part, focusing primarily on price and simply navigating i bought the Magellan 3100. It is supposed to be the cheapest GPS just about but still offer the good quality of the more expensive models. Well that was wrong! First off most if not all GPS's have POI's (points of interest.) These are destinations all over the county that you can search on the machine. The point being, if you are in an area where you don't know where to eat, get fast food, go food shopping, find any type of store, park or government building POI's become VERY handy and we used them a lot on our trip. The Magellan ended up having 750,000. this seems like a lot but divide that number by 50 and that is the average for your entire state. That number is actually surprisingly low. Middle and upper end GPS's typically have millions of POI's. So the POI database was basically useless. Also the navigating and satellite communication functions were glitch-y.

Then, deciding to return it we realized we would get a restocking fee of 15%! DOH! So i decided to try selling it on ebay. Well, we sold it on Ebay but we still ended up losing money :(

This is now the part that Nikki will like. From the very beginning Nikki said we should get the same machine we had on our trip. In the beginning i quickly rejected that thinking it would be too expensive. BUT i was wrong. Upon researching Garmin i realized they had basically the same unit we had on the vacation but not the same amount of bells and whistles we would never use. So we got the Garmin c530 for what i think was a great price.(only $50 more than the Magellan) (the unit we had on vacation was the Garmin c550)

The unit is PERFECT. It has a database of over 5 million and navigates very well. So far there have been no problems and we both love it, especially Nikki.

We will be going to Gettysburg in the middle of October so we intend on making good use of it on that trip.

Oooooo Gettysburg...i think i sense another battle map!! haHA...until then!!... :)