Lara as you have probably deduced, is our new Garmin Nuvi GPS. She got her nickname from the Aussie female voice giving out the directions. "ATTENTION HUMANS ... THIS VOICE CANNOT BE CHANGED OR ALTERED IN ANY WAY".
It was good move to upgrade from our old Navman, as Lara has got us through some tricky navigational problems, and got us into a few as well. One of the latter happened in the countryside where I took a different course and forgot to disable Lara first. "In 250 metres select 4WD and turn left onto a goat track". As she desperately tried to get us back on course. I ignored that, and the next instruction was "In 400 metres turn left into a muddy firebreak and follow trees for 4.9 kilometres ...recalculating, recalculating, drive to nearest road, any damn road, recalculating, lost satellite reception, are you lost too?". It is especially funny on a major highway where upgrades have taken the road away from the original map fix, then Lara really loses the plot, parks the car's avatar on the side of the road and sulks until the mapping starts to match up with her internal memory.
Where she does shine though is in a big city like Sydney, where being certified insane is an advantage on the roads here. She weaves us around and through areas that we have never heard of let alone visited, but still gets us to the destination. Sydney airport is a notorious destination for the uninitiated, and Lara took me right to the Arrivals pickup point. I drove on past to access the public carpark and Lara responded "Arrived at destination on left. Why are we leaving destination on left. WHERE ARE YOU GOING BUDDY?. Recalculating, switching off to preserve battery life and sanity".
There is no doubt we would have been in dire straits without her guidance, especially on the approach from Ballarat to the Western Gate bridge in Melbourne. I took a wrong veer and ended up in an industrial estate but Lara faithfully guided us back onto the approach motorway through factory carparks etc. She didn't mention anything about experiencing gridlock, 4 lanes wide, before during and after the bridge though. If she has one teensy weensy failing, it would be sometimes (just sometimes Lara) not giving us enough advance warning ahead of a direction change, for example, telling us to turn right when we are halfway across the intersection can be a bit tricky. Overall though we are very happy with our Garmin, it is easy to operate and pretty damn reliable and accurate. Thank you Lara
Next week "For Whom the Etag Beeps"
