The GPS / Das GPS

It was shortly after a road trip to Maine when I, the navigator, instructed Peter, the driver, to take the next exit which Peter proceeded to drive right by saying, “You didn’t mean that exit, did you?”, a mistake which ended in a good 60 mile detour, that we started thinking about buying a GPS. At the time in late 2006/2007, they were very pricey, but we ultimately decided that it was worth the splurge. Since then, we’ve often said it was the best money we’ve ever spent. To be able to get in the car, enter a destination, and be led there without much additional effort really takes the stress out of driving somewhere new.

Our GPS has only led us astray twice, once directing us to a gas station that was actually an empty lot in a seedy neighborhood of Philadelphia, and once leading us to a Dunkin Donuts that was supposed to be where a warehouse stood. Both were not ‘her’ fault – they must have been programming errors in the pre-loaded points of interest. We’ve come to so trust our GPS that we usually travel without maps, even here in Europe.

I actually like maps, spending quite a lot of time examining them when we drive, checking out the lakes and rivers and town names and points of interest en-route. I realized this as we drove south from Innsbruck through the Brenner Pass to Italy. I had no sense of where we were, what progress we were making, where noteworthy mountains were and so on. We passed several castles and one ancient fortification of some kind, but I have no idea what or where they were.

We reached Bressanone/Brixen in good time, a mere 12 kilometers from our hotel, when we reached an intersection where the GPS told us to turn right even though there was a sign for Luson/Lüsen (the town the hotel is in) pointing to the left. We had a momentary wonder about what to do, but then decided to trust the GPS over our own instinct. It’s a choice you have to make with a GPS – either you believe it or you don’t, and once you start doubting, it’s a slippery slope. So off we went, turning right and quickly taking a steep road that took us further up and around a mountain on the edge of Bressanone/Brixen. Up and up we climbed, the GPS directing us right and left, higher and higher. It was beautiful up there in the mountains, but as the road became narrower and the curbs disappeared and the tarmac changed to hard packed gravel and we knew we had been led astray, I started having flashbacks.

Back when I was a kid living in England, we drove to Spain for a vacation. I don’t remember all the details and over time might have added my own imaginary details to what actually happened. But, as I remember it, somewhere in France, we ran into protesters who were blocking the road with burning tires. They sent us onward, up a mountain road that would supposedly get us to Spain. But as the road got narrower and narrower and the curbs disappeared and the tarmac changed to dirt, my parents got worried and ultimately turned back. As the story goes, others who were sent up the mountain disappeared. Forever.

So this is what is flashing through my mind as we are climbing higher, nowhere to turn around because the road is too windy and narrow. Luckily Nikolas was asleep in the back seat for much of the climb until we reached the peak and shortly came across a house with people outside who assured us to keep going, that we’d eventually get back down the mountain and back to the main road (the road that the left hand turn would have taken us to) to Luson/Lüsen.

Ultimately we made it, a few buckets of sweat lighter, having gone about 30 mountainous kilometers further than we needed to, putting in about 45 extra minutes of driving. Our trust in our GPS is, indeed, shaken. We know how to get home, and presumably, so will the GPS. But if there is a next time, a right when we should go left, what will we do? To trust or not to trust the GPS? That is the question.