Christmas Idea: GPS

This past summer, my family and my parents jetted off to Orlando.  Well, we jettd in our cars as the price of gas is far less than plane tickets and a rental in Orlando.  Needless to say, we had never been on that long stretch of highway and all of those giant cities (We live in a small Canadian city).

We bought my parents a GPS (Garmin Nuvi 250) as an anniversary gift.  My wife’s parents bought a Garmin Nuvi 350 back in the early spring just to have one.  They let us borrow their 350 for the drive.  So with the both cars all GPS equipped, we went on our way.

Let me first just say if you have never used a GPS unit, they are WAY more than just about helping you get to your final destination.  Having one on a long drive is a flat out must as far as I am concerned.  They show you where just about every gas station, restauraunt, hotel, motel, mall, coffee shop, etc… that you can imagine.  With all of that at your disposal, it makes unplanned stops far easier to manage as when you travelled the old way with paper maps, you rarely brought a city map for every place along the highway.  And of course, no paper map has near the information that a GPS has.

The average GPS costs about $250 and I would not recommend any other brand than Garmin.  I have read a great number of reviews and tried using TomTom and Navigon brands in the store after all of the time I had with a Garmin and there is just no contest in overall ease of use.

The only real gotcha with a GPS is that there is a fee to update the maps and points of interest (Gas, food, etc…).  These updates come out about once a year and the prices vary from one brand to another.  The one nice thing about most is that for the first 30 days after registering on the internet, you are eligible for a full map update to whatever is the current map set for free.

As for my parents?  They have been using their gifted unit for more than 5 months and they love it.  At first, they admitted that it was difficult to trust it to know what it was doing but after more playing (3 months) they have accepted that it knows what it is up to.  Also, one night in Orlando, they decided to go out just the two of them and they did not get lost going where they went nor when they came back to the resort we were all at.

In short, if anyone you know likes to drive to other cities, even if they are fairly familiar with some of the cities, you cannot go wrong giving someone a GPS.