I used to think I had a pretty good sense of direction. I always felt that I had an intuitive sense of which way was which. Then I bought a GPS. Ever since then, I’ve been lost.

The GPS itself is fine. It’s a Garmin unit designed for boating so it’s waterproof – at least it was until it got thoroughly rained on in Nova Scotia last year and took four days to dry out but to it’s credit, it does still work.

It’s a pretty decent unit. You can load some pretty excellent maps into it and the driving directions are pretty good, most of the time. I liked it so much I figured it would be a decent addition to the bike and bought some mounts for it. I even rigged my tank bag to route the proprietary cable into a spliced audio cable so I could hear directions via headphones. There’s no power on the cable as I am too lazy to wire it to the battery, but it does have an eight hour battery life so I don’t care. It’s saved me getting lost on numerous occasions but recently, I’ve not put it on the bike. Being a boating unit, there’s no touch screen so it’s a pain to program with gloves on and it’s heavy so when you stop and remove it (there’s no locking it to the bike) you have to carry it.

So yesterday, when Nick and I were out and about looking for somewhere, I really regretted not having it. We ended up driving in circles looking all around. In the end, I got so desperate I tired the GPS on my blackberry phone. I guess it’s mainly designed for city use as the first problem was the phone had NO CLUE where I was. Of course, as we were looking for a specific road it couldn’t locate it with search so I had to zoom in and scroll around until I found it. Even then, directions were useless as the phone didn’t know where we were (I am amazed at this in a so-called GPS device so it bears repeating).

And even when we did find where we were looking for, I realized the roads weren’t actually labelled with anything as useful as a name or route number unless you scrolled right in, which in turn made it all but impossible to figure out where to go. All it told us was a general direction, which we both knew anyway. After ten more minutes we found where we were going and had a blast riding up and down the forks of the credit road about fifteen times but getting there was a pain.

Next time, I either have to suck it up and take the GPS or go buy a new, smaller one. Getting lost on straight back roads in Ontario is just too plain boring.

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