Garmoan

We have this love/hate thing going with our Garmin GPS Numi 275 with European Maps.

Our first experience with her, driving from Lyon to Carpentras, we were tremendously impressed. I think we made a few wrong turns based on some confusing instructions from her, but all-in-all it went quite well.

It all fell apart on the road to Bourg d'Oisans. Immediately after we started we ran into a closed road due to construction. I'll admit that I probably made a mistake by not hitting the "detour" button, but I figured that if I drove a different direction she'd simply recalculate the directions from whichever direction I was pointing. She says "recalculating", doesn't she?

This first close road resulted in her taking us onto some dirt road and boonie-crashing for about 5 miles before emerging on the paved road she'd originally intended. We should have learned something from the experience.

The trip to Bourg d'Oisans was supposed to be 3 hours. We were doing well until we came upon another road closure. How is it the French can close a road for construction, a road with no other way out but the way you came, and not let you know AS YOU ENTER THAT ROAD that the road's going to be closed down the way a bit? We were rolling along then, bam! Road closed. And we'd traveled a good 10+ miles dowm this road. We turned around and I again trusted the Garmin (Dum Dum, as Alan Coldray refers to them, playing off of the Tom Tom brand name) to get me out of the jam. She tried to steer us onto an upaved road (I learned later that you can ask her to ignore unpaved roads--that feature's been clicked on since).

At one point, she had us take a right turn and head up several switchbacks to the top of a hill. At the top of the hill was a ski resort and a roundabout (they use lots of roundabouts in Europe). Garmin then had me take the roundabout and head back the way I'd just come! After getting to the bottom of the hill, she sent me back down the road of the original closure.

We gave up, found our way to Gap, which I knew was on the way to where we wanted to be, and we bought a map. We figured out what to do, and also saw what Garmin was trying to do. She had us going a legitimate direction, but she didn't know what to do with the road closure. Next time, I'll try hitting "detour" and see what happens.

Lessons? Have a paper map back-up, take a look at the route generally and listen for any weird directions.

We've been using here consistently since and she's performing well. Much of what we experienced may have been novice mistakes.

We left Carpentras at 9 a.m. and should have been in Bourg d'Oisans around 12:30. We rolled in at 5:00 p.m. It was a long day. We saw a lot of France, though.