Why I need a GPS

October 25th 2010

I would like to talk today about why I am going to buy a GPS for my car.

So the trip every sunday to church can be kind of tiring sometimes. It is an hour and a half through a road with a lot of traffic and stop lights. It does have some nice views of the ocean but it is mostly city which sort of gets boring to look at very quickly.

About two weeks ago someone at church recommended that I take a different road as it would cut twenty minutes off my time because there are hardly any traffic lights and the speed limit is higher. It went through really middle of no where Japan but the view was pretty amazing. That day I looked it up on my phone and some how found out how to get home really easily with only checking the GPS on my phone once or twice.

Because of conference and being sick I hadn't been to that building in two weeks so I thought I would try the mountain road on the way there. It was a little confusing and I did end up taking more time then normal but I made it just fine.

On the way home however, things just didn't work out. I don't know how but I got really lost. When you get away from the densely populated areas of Japan, things are very different. Many roads not only didn't say what road it was, they would not have any signs at all. I had a sort of idea of where to go but everything looked so different going the other direction. I kind of had an idea of what cities should be next so I followed the arrows, but things weren't going so well with that.

So I tried to use the GPS on my phone, pulled over of course, but my phone's worthlessness really shined. I could understand if it had a hard time finding my location, it was cloudy and I think the GPS antenna in those phones is smaller then a proper GPS, but this thing would tell me I am in the wrong location. Relying on this thing caused me to go in complete opposite directions and just get much more lost then if I just had a simple compass.

Then the rain really started to come down and so did the Sun. It got dark and stormy and I was driving around on swerving roads with no idea at all where I was. It was kind of scary. Like I didn't really feel like I was in any actual danger, but I felt like I was just setting up some Japanese ghost story. The inaka (japanese country side) has it's own sense of scary and I really felt it.

What was supposed to be a simple 1 hour 10 minute drive turned into 2+ hours. And if I just had a GPS that worked, I would have been home before it got dark and stormy. So I am going to go out shopping for one after work, but at least I have a little story now.