GPS...the new HAL?

Recalculating...turn right into Gulf of Mexico

I'll be the first to admit it: when I'm going somewhere new, I'll either plop the address into Google Maps, or program it into my Garmin (who I've named Jack, since that's the male American English text-to-speech voice name, and it's more satisfying to yell, "Shut up, Jack!" when I do something he doesn't like).

Imagine my dismay when I realized that no matter how many avoidances I programmed into Jack, he'd never take me straight down US 1.  You see, the GPS device is marketed to today's driver: get there as quickly as possible.  This makes you re-think the role of your GPS if you're taking a meandering route (or very specific, like my trek).  I tried everything I could think to map a direct route down US 1, using Google Maps and Microsoft Streets and Trips.  Each time, regardless of instructions, the software decided that because it was a longer journey, I must want to take the fastest possible route.  I had to manually drag the route, using either program, to stay on US 1.  Each day's map took me about 30 to 45 minutes to program...and even then, I couldn't successfully transfer it to Jack.  (That may be either due to my incompetence, or the ridiculous number of waypoints that each leg of the journey entailed.)

Now why, you may ask, would you need a GPS for this road trip?  It's simple, right?  Go to the end (or beginning, however you want to look at it) of US 1, and follow the signs.  Not so fast.  I have discovered, the hard way, that most of the big cities along US 1 have some issues with signage.  As in, there's little to none.  (Providence, Rhode Island, I'm looking at you.)  Boston wins the prize for signage, but it's a cheat: US 1 there is an expressway.  Jack did his part well: I could use him as a map that tracked my progress, and if I lost US 1 (more often than I expected), I would zoom the GPS display out and hope the little US 1 shield would pop up again.  Between Jack the Garmin and Google Directions on my Nexus S running Gingerbread 2.3.4 (it's FREE, you Apple snobs!), I almost always found my way after circling back.  (Again, I'm looking at you, Providence.  And Pawtucket, for that matter.)  Paper maps of the big cities along the route might have been useful...but yours truly only went for state maps.  After all, US 1 will be easy to follow, right?

But the number one piece of tech that I used for this road trip was the most complex computer on the face of the planet: the human brain.  Yes, there was a time when we didn't have talking computers in our cars that told us when to turn.  We looked at maps.  We followed road signs.  And when those failed us, if we didn't have a Y chromosome, we stopped and asked for directions.  Yep, there's that "get out of the car and talk to the locals" thread again.

I think Jack knew that I wasn't using his mapping function after Quebec.  So he sent me on the most bizarre route possible to get to Fort Kent, ME.  I ended up on a dirt road with inclines steeper than 50 degrees.  I felt like I was driving on a dirt-track roller coaster, rather like the streets of San Francisco -- the actual streets, not the 70s tv show -- but with towering pines on either side.  And no pavement.  The trusty Saturn VUE and I came out the other end in one piece, only to find that we intersected with the paved road Jack had guided us off of.

Did I hear that Garmin snicker?