Tales from the Vacation Drive
Funny navigation story: We're driving along in northern Indiana, and I notice that the voice commands for the Ford Flex's navigation system are off. "Great," I say, "I hate having the music interrupted by those voices when I'm driving. The turn commands are very clear and the nav system screen is huge. We shouldn't have any problem."
You can guess what happened next: Interstate 80, not too far east from the Illinois-Indiana border, splits off from I-94. The trick is, if you go straight, welcome to I-94! My wife noticed the very large "I-80 Toledo Right Lanes" sign too late for me to adjust. Luckily, the Flex's nav system quickly showed us that by getting off at the next stop, only a couple of miles down the road, and then heading south for a couple of miles, we could rejoin I-80.
We turned the voice commands on and left them on for the rest of the trip. Music be damned.
Danger of road games: So we like to play games with the kids on our drives, my wife and I. We play Slug Bug, we play the Alphabet Game (find every letter in the alphabet in sequence on roadside signs and billboards) and more. The games took nasty turns on Leg 1. First, my wife apparently can't adequately determine the difference between a VW Beetle (new or old), a PT Cruiser and a Mini Cooper. Driving long distances is hard enough without getting a bruise on my right arm. Secondly, we were in the midst of a difficult Alphabet Game when we came up against the dreaded Q. You don't see a lot of them on the road, believe you me. So when my wife saw it, she shouted "Q!" and slugged me on my right arm as hard as she could.
Perhaps we should stick to naming all the state capitals.
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What happened to the good old days when there were no nav systems on cars? How on earth did we manage to get places?
Seriously now, while I can appreciate the help of the nav system in a town I'm not familiar with, relying on it entirely on long stretches of highway just seems as extreme laziness to me ;)
Both my cars have nav systems and I'm probably using them less than once a month.
Anyways... have a safe trip!
satnav - I hate machines that talk to me particularly sat navs and Lifts - floor ten doors opening dive me insane!
no