My New Friend Nuvi

I received a Garmin Nuvi portable GPS for Christmas. Virginia does not have a lot of street lights or street signs which can make it difficult to find new places. I always know when I have crossed into Maryland because all of a sudden there are signs. I refer to the GPS as “Nuvi”. Nuvi is a very polite woman and she does not yell at me even when I do not follow her directions. I know I have made a mistake when she tells me she is “recalculating”. I have used Nuvi a little bit since Christmas, but only for places around town that I already knew or with internet directions and a map as a back up. Nuvi had her first real test this past weekend on the way to Keswick Hall near Charlottesville. The directions on the hotel web site were vague and the various internet direction sites all gave me different directions so I decided to put my faith in Nuvi. No map, just the vague hotel directions and Nuvi is all we took. It was all fine for the first part of the trip because Nuvi had us on the same route as the hotel directions, but then somewhere in the middle of nowhere Virginia, she deviated. We were a little hesitant, but trusted her…at first. Then it seemed she was just playing with us seeing how many turns she could make us take and how many small towns she could take us through. We had no idea where she was taking us or if we were anywhere near our destination. If Nuvi broke down, we would be in trouble since we had no idea where we were during most of the trip. Since we have not used Nuvi much, we did not know about all of her features and eventually saw that she gave us the time we would arrive at our destination. That made us feel better because the time was ten minutes less than what the internet directions gave. At exactly the time she gave, we arrived at our destination!