I had a couple of longish solo car trips coming up, so I thought I had better cave in to my techie instincts and get myself a satnav. As it happens Amazon were selling a ‘fully refurbished’ Garmin for a very reasonable amount. Now I can’t imagine what goes in to refurbishing a satnav. It doesn’t have much in the way of removable parts which could be cleaned by a specialist craftsman and replaced in shiny new condition. However I don’t really see Amazon as an Arthur Daley type organisation selling knocked of previously owned satnavs in Rye Lane in Peckham. So I gave them money and they gave me a satnav. Isn’t commerce wonderful.
Fresh out of the box you are faced with a bit of a ‘so what’ moment. Unless you have somewhere to go immediately it’s not like you can give it much of a spin and standing outside turning around so you see the little car change direction pales after a while. Round about the time you start to become dizzy. Still I had some garden stuff in need of purchase so I asked the satnav to tell me how to get to the Everton Garden Centre. OK not a great test of it’s navigational skills, but we didn’t want to go any further. This was when we encountered problem number one. It loves you to put in a post code, but then it asks for a house number. Bit of a problem around these parts. Not having a house number is pretty common, and my recollection of post codes is that they can cover up to ten properties or something. Hardly a deal breaker, but something of a shortcoming to my eyes. I don’t know if we had spent more we would have got a bell or whistle which looked up house names for us, I suppose in the end it depends if the name is in its database.
Having successfully navigated the few miles to Everton and back, it got us within shouting distance, we decided on a greater challenge for the lady with no discernible accent. Incidentally is there some place in Middle England where the satnav people recruit from where the indigenous populace have no accent whatsoever? Or is there some Professor Higgins hidden away turning out electrically perfect Elizas? Anyways, we decided on a trip to the ‘local’ B&Q warehouse at Nursling to give our own Eliza a bit of a run out. As it happens it turned into a bit of a run around as we remembered in time that the New Forest Show had manifested in Brock that week and there’s one thing you shouldn’t do at that time and that is to drive along the A337 right past the show-ground. The primary reason being that you would become intimate with the back of the car in front as you (occasionally) edged closer to Lyndhurst. It gets a tad busy.
Having set the course for quickest route which would have been via the 337, we promptly turned in the completely opposite direction to head towards Beaulieu. I didn’t count the number of times Eliza said “recalculating”, but I think ‘multiple’ covers it. Strange thing is, you find yourself telling Eliza that actually you will not turn in the direction she is suggesting and what is she going to do about it. Or at least we did. Maybe that’s just us. However we had the immense benefit of not having to inform Eliza that we were a. In the UK and b. Wished our directions to be in English. We had been told by Yomping Buddy that the satnav in their (German) car had taken to believing it was in Dusseldorf and defaulted to German. As a result it had to be reset at the start of every journey. I had suggested that if it indicated she should drive across the Polish border it might be best to ignore the advice. Apparently it now behaves itself having been given a seeing to on the Great West Road recently. Just makes you think, would Columbus have ‘found’ America if he’d been using a satnav? Then again he was looking for the Far East, so maybe he was.