This is one reason that I liked the Agip stations in Italy. There was always someone to operate the pump for you and take your money. For only a few extra lira he wouldn't overcharge you too much.

Refreshingly dishonest, yet pleasingly consistent.

The clouds in the Great Plains have a tendency to look like Zeus in a really bad mood. Good thing they're fifty miles away over there.

C. Wingate @ #4: I think I've heard someone quote this here, but it bears repeating--the difference between Americans and Europeans is that an American thinks 100 years is a long time, and a European thinks 100 miles is a long way.

immediately followed by

"Of course!"

I should really just e-mail you my current cell phone number.

Crazy(alas, the e-mail listed as my own is no longer servicable, so I'll have to do the sending and hope you have access)Soph

That sounds beautiful!

Nice idea, but the ferries do not carry cars.

That's why I said "almost drive to France". You can drive to the ferry, and I'm not sure why you'd need a car on the teeny tiny islands.

We stopped for lunch in a small town one time and they wouldn't even approach the booth until they saw my T-shirt about Toponas and Parschall (tiny towns in Colorado, in those days having each about 10 residents.)

And the really funny thing is the Coloradans who HATE Californians moving to Colorado are usually Californians who moved here just a few years earlier.

If this is incoherent, I apologize, having a terrible Monday at work. End of break.

I don't think it actually _can_ work, or at least won't work for long. At least here in the UK. The problem with it is this: when a car drives into the station to refuel, in most places now there are automatic number plate recognition systems. The ANPR records the number of the vehicle that pulls up to each pump; when you pay for the fuel, an entry is added to the database stating that the fuel that was pumped into your car has been paid for.

Net result of pulling this scam: a database entry with your car's registration number, and a note that the fuel hasn't been paid for, which will (presumably) be duly reported to the police as theft. Paying for somebody else's fuel achieves nothing, except confusing the clerk when somebody comes in and tries to pay for fuel that has already been paid for. You'd be just as likely to get away with simply driving off without paying, which is somewhat more profitable.

One can drive directly from the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the French Republic, without going through Belgium, by the way. One has to do so on the island of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin, where the inhabitants, being civilised, have as their native speech, something they call English.

Of course, it should be noted that the driver is quite likely to get away with it anyway... there's a strange reluctance in most European countries to follow up minor crimes perpetrated by citizens of other European countries; I imagine the paperwork's too complicated, or something.

Perhaps these are 80-year-old gasoline pumps or some such?

Dave

Assuming the clerk has a monitor, he can see that flow had stopped for two pumps, numbers 3 and 4, both of which have cars with Dutch plates at them. So when a guy who is clearly Dutch comes in and says he's from pump 4, if the clerk looks up, he sees Dutch plates. Even if there is another guy hanging around that car, it could be another passenger or something.

But the clerk probably doesn't look up, because he has a queue of drivers speaking bad French or just holding up fingers to indicate which pump they're at, plus a shop full of snacks to keep an eye on.

I've seen a requirement to pay before pumping after hours, in some very small service stations in very rural France. But the big ones on the toll roads all seem to be pump first, then pay.

What an odd scam.

I guess it's too late for poppies. That was one of the best parts of driving in the French countryside for me. The beautiful red poppies, looking for all the world like a Monet painting.

It is probably sunflower season, which is special in and of itself.

*aka canola

Or perhaps Jane Curtin or Dan Ackroyd saying, "We are from France."

I am kind of curious, though -- Abi, what kinds of beliefs do the Dutch of your acquaintance have about their country, their nationality, their culture?

[1] "Do y'know was copper wire invented? Two Dutchmen were fighting over a penny."

wrt distances, I remember discussing this with someone in the British naval museum in Greenwich and came up with a handy factoid: London to Istanbul (most of the way across Europe) is a little over half the distance across the US. It's not that Europeans necessarily think 100 miles is a long distance, but they have no flyover territory for a referent.

On the subject of distance, I recall how every Irish person I spoke to was flabbergasted that I was going to drive for 5 hours (about 200 miles on what Americans would consider back roads) in one day. I'll be driving longer than that just to get to Readercon this week.

realize that the distance from Washington to Great Falls, MT was about the same as the distance from Paris to Moscow

Even Americans do this in Australia. A colleague was planning to fly into Sydney and drive up to a conference in Cairns. I have a postcard on my office door with the outlines of the USA and Australia superimposed, so I could show him that this was going to take longer than he had in mind.

I think a lot of people in the US have a mental model of Australia as being a big place, even bigger than Texas.

Although after my trip to Germany/Austria last year I learned that "100 miles" is one hour away by Autobahn. That was fun, and made planning easy.

P J Evans @33
CHip, there are people in the western US who think that driving even a couple of hundred miles, with or without company, is some form of cruel and unusual punishment.

Which part of the western US? Here in California it feels like many people think nothing of trips from SF to Lake Tahoe (160 miles each way) or LA to Las Vegas (260 each way).

It took me a noticeable amount of time to figure out where the sudden voice was coming from, and even more what they were saying.

Hahahahaha! Oops, sorry. Depends which stretch of Autobahn you mean. On a TV show about people who'd emigrated from Germany, a man who had ended up somewhere in the Southwest US said, "When I get in my RV and drive half an hour, I'm in the middle of nowhere. When I'm in Cologne and drive half an hour, I'm still...in Cologne." Not because Cologne is so large, but because the Autobahns in the vicinity are hopelessly jammed.

That said, it's interesting the mental adjustments I've made living here. I grew up in Tampa, and went to uni in Tallahassee, a good 5 hours' drive by car. Pretty far, but not such a huge deal. Frankfurt is now half that distance from me, but feels much further.

I first heard that joke about two Scotsmen.

I moved from one notoriously tightfisted nation to another, so I already have a good notion of how these things look from the inside. As my husband says, "It's just about choosing your expenditures, so you have enough when you want it."

Having said that, the Dutch do put a lot of attention into how much things cost, and getting a good deal is a valued achievement. The Dutch word for "inexpensive" or "cheap" is "goedkoop"—good purchase.

A few anecdotes:

• My Dutch teacher once spent about ten minutes discussing with us the different costs and time penalties of getting to our office. He knew how many strippen (fare units) it was on the bus, and preferred the slightly slower ferry because it was free.


• One day at lunch, I happened to be wearing a black button-down shirt and sitting next to a colleague wearing one as well. Comments were made. He mentioned that his wasn't anything special—just a €15 shirt from a chain store. I shrugged and said mine had been €4.99 from the local supermarket. Everyone nodded their heads approvingly; that was goedkoop, and I won that round.


• My colleagues routinely ask for, negotiate for, and get discounts when they buy furniture, TV's, or other big-ticket items, even from chain stores. It's not universal, but it's not uncommon either.


• The Dutch play with their reputation, too. When I was just moving to the Netherlands, I asked if it was "done" to tip taxi drivers. One of my colleagues joked that it was actually traditional to try to negotiate a discount at that point in the ride.

(There is a certain amount of Dutch-style architecture in the Fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, and in the Isle of Axholme.)

And then there are the gas stations in New Jersey where by state law you aren't allowed to pump your own. The attendant may even wash your windshield. And the gas is usually cheaper than anywhere else along the way.

I know that the way I label trips is weird-- I can't possibly visit friends four hours away without serious plans, that's a long trip, but driving halfway across Pennsylvania this weekend is nothing at all. It's kind of like money.

*if you drive through cornfields, it must be further away than if not. Suburbs get to me.

my forebears were Dutch and Scots, so we know the value of a penny. Bang went Saxpence in fact - another one of those antediluvian Punch cartoons, a Scot complaining about the expense of London, "Mun, a had na' been the-erre abune Twa Hoours when- Bang went Saxpence!!!"

@42, yes, the autobahn speeds are not what they seem. I drove from Frankfurt to Switzerland, at 160km/h whenever legal and possible, but averaged 105km/h in cold fact. Now I can drive for half an hour and still be in the suburbs of Denver, never mind getting to downtown or actually out of town. So much for the spacious American West. It's a dream, only a dream..

The Overseas Highway is not a road in rural Montana. Driving from Key West to Key Largo takes more like four hours. There are traffic lights on the Overseas Highway.

My brother is a Michigander, like me, but he's been living in SoCal a bit too long. Some years ago he was at a conference near LaGuardia Airport, and he wanted to come visit me in Hoboken. In a blizzard. I told him he was crazy, that it would take him hours and hours to drive that. He said "it's only four miles! How long could it take?"

He arrived four hours later...in soaking-wet sneakers.

You really must tell us more about your family one of these days.

When you get out onto the high plains, people cease to pay attention to the speed limit (even though technically they once again have them in Montana). It's common to find yourself going 80 mph on a two-lane road with no cars or buildings in sight.

My step-father's mother asked why we didn't see his brothr more often.

"Mother, he lives in Eugene."

"And... it's only one state north."

Trying to convince her that making the drive would put her in Canada was pretty hard.

She never really did understand why we didn't make the trip at least once a year.

Then again, she also couldn't understand why we lived where there were earthquakes, never mind that one of her other chilcren (who also lived in SC) lost part of his house, two years running, to hurricanes.

The sunglasses and hat appeared at the window.

"Son, you know you were doing 85 miles an hour? You aren't gonna get anywhere driving that slow."

And got back in his car, and disappeared over the horizon.

The end of the first day and most of the second were on péage, the French toll freeways. They're wide, well-maintained, and have good rest stops*, but we also paid tolls amounting to about the cost of another tank of gas†.

The really slow bit was the last 100km, which took an hour and a half. That was mostly one-lane highway through hilly country. Thank goodness for travel sickness pills‡!

-----
* Well, apart from the two where I had to teach Fiona the art of using a squat toilet.
† €60ish
‡ Fiona, like me at her age, is a barfer.

New Jersey has the lowest fuel tax in the country (or close to it), so the gas is cheap. The price you pay, however, is the wear-and-tear on your car over Jersey roads, or the extra fuel you burn circling around because New Jersey can't pay for good signage.

I don't know what Pennsylvania's excuse is, though. Same crappy roads, same poor signage, but our gas is 10-15 cents higher.

I have come to love NJ since I moved to PA, though. I have to drive home (to NYC) regularly enough that I refill my tank on cheap gas about half the time, and I don't have to pump it myself.

and

...was about the same as the distance from Paris to Moscow?

I remember arriving at (I think) the Gare du Nord as a small child and seeing that you could get on a train to Moscow. And then my Dad told me about the Trans-Siberian railway which can take you from Moscow to China.

I hadn't realised that these were places you could buy a ticket and just go to*.

Some years later my brother rode the Trans-Siberian Railway and the agent gave him a bootleg CD of train-related music for something to listen to if the scenery got a bit monotonous, as well as a list of things to look out for with the kilometre marker nearest it.

* This being the 80s, you couldn't as getting a visa etc. was difficult and slow. But still.

*probably several trains

He discovered that driving the autobahn faster that about 180 km/h (112 mph) actually increased his total travel time, due to the decreased fuel efficiency and the increased frequency of fueling stops.

BTW, that's about the same distance as driving Madrid to Tehran, or Amsterdam to Toshkent, Uzbekistan.

*Yes, Cuba is much closer, but unless you have a DUKW, you aren't driving there.

An C. Wingate -- We passed the Sacramento sign this summer on the beginning of our vacation. It always amuses the kids, and always makes me want to actually drive it, albeit not on I-80.

There's some kind of loophole for "key card" gas stations. These are entirely unstaffed, and used by fleet vehicles (delivery services, police departments).

It's beautiful there - I haven't been up for a few years now, but you're going at a great time of year.

Anyone else considering a National Park in that vicinity, Glacier is really magnificent. (Try the Going-to-the-Sun road - my sister still laughs at me for making her drive that stretch.)

(Like just about everyone else here), I had that same conversation with some German engineers who came to visit GE's Schenectady works.

They figured, that as long as they were already IN upstate New York, they should run over to see Niagara Falls and check it off their life-lists. I had to break it to them that the Falls were still a good ten-hour roundtrip.

We got to talking, and I pointed out to them that "NY-to-LA" was comparable to "London-to-Tehran".

Welcome to France! I hope you'll have a pleasant stay. Fortunately you avoided the heat wave from last week but I'm afraid they are forecasting a new one.

"Beyond it the hill drops off sharply, opening up a view of forested hills and fertile countryside. The wind brings me the mixed scents of chlorine and lavender."
Hmm...let me guess: Lubéron? Ardèche?

Ah, the plague of the Dutch camping-cars and caravanes. I have to drive 50km on the highway every day to go to work and they've been plaguing me since beginning of June.
To top it off, we had the Tour de France and a certain Mr. Armstrong in town yesterday. Commuting to Amsterdam would have been faster...

Fun fact: there was an American band playing in the Roman arenas yesterday and we could hear the crowd singing SEEK AAAANNND, SEEK AND DESTROY!!! from 10km away.

I'm a caldovore. I'm glad to hear there's a heat wave forecast. Although the clouds are picturesque and all that, I want to be baked senseless until I go in the pool.

Hmm...let me guess: Lubéron? Ardèche?

Lubéron is closer. The nearest thing of any size is Mazamet. Which puts us in striking distance of Carcasonne, among other delights.

they've been plaguing me since beginning of June.

That will have to be the childless, or the parents of preschoolers. Northern Dutch schools only let out last Friday. The middle of the country starts the summer vacations this coming Friday, and southern schools will release their kids the Friday after. And the schools are extremely strict about taking kids out of class outside of the official vacation times.

Commuting to Amsterdam would have been faster...

You underestimate our local traffic jams. Like cheese, we keep the best at home and only export the lesser versions.

In that case, you should have come to FiestaCon/WesterCon this last weekend. Tempe, Arizona, was an oven haven for the likes of you.

The nearest thing of any size is Mazamet
I See. Wonderful region, mixing the charm of the Mediterranean South and the lushness of Auvergne. Good food can be had.

If you have the time (and if you like this kind of things), do try to visit some of the cathares castles. They are mostly in a bad condition but the scenery is fantastic and you can just breathe the depth and marvels (and, well, horrors) of history.

dave @82:
While we're picking nits, shouldn't those be thermophiles?

Aaaaand back to work.

Further west in Britain we have Atlantic clouds which come over in big flat layers for half the time and puffy little fluffinesses the other half.

A few months ago I noticed the number of cars with foreign numberplates parked in the streets round where I live. (South-East London) So, in an act of true geekishness, I have been keeping an occasional notebook with counts of vehicles with foreign plates. So far France is winning, hardly surprisingly, but the Netherlands are not far behind.

But I think there are proportionatly more buses from France and more lorries (trucks) from NL. I don't think I've seen any caravans/mobile homes yet. Proper analysis with Chi squared on my blog when & if I can be bothered :)

dave @82:
Have you never noticed how you're less hungry when it's really hot? Some people say it's just that the heat kills their appetite, but I don't believe it.

Christian @84:
We've been to Carcassonne once already, on an autumn day when the tourist load was quite light but the weather good. We know that it'll be crowded, going back during the summer. But it's so neat.

Fragano @87:
Nee, pittige eten doen mij pijn.

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathar_castles

cathars/cathares == albigensians.

As Carcassonne, some of them might be crowded.

*Note the pronoun.

(Of course the shops sold the game Carcassonne. I was a little surprised that they missed the marketing opportunity to have a special "really purchased at Carcassonne" edition produced.)

Our favorite site during our visit to the area a couple of years ago was Peyrepertuse. It's a beautiful (ruin of a) Cathar castle, and in surprisingly good shape all things considered -- probably because it's a pain to get to, on a steep pinnacle, so less tempting for people to mine for ready-cut stone. A lot of the defensive features are still very clear, and we had a ball wandering around the different levels of the structure.

Peyrepertuse is a bit further south than Carcassonne -- whether a lot or a little brings us back to the earlier discussions of distance. According to Google, it's about 150km on the A roads, or 85km as the crow staggers from town to town on local roads.

But I have to say that the Northern/Norman turret roofs installed by Viollet-le-Duc are jarring, to say the least. And I'm a fan of Viollet-le-Duc!

Jörg @97:
The cross-border transit cooperation that permanently blew my circuits was that the airport for Aachen (in Germany) is actually in Maastricht (in the Netherlands).

But things have turned round, somewhere in my brain, to the extent that finding out that Luxembourg still maintains its customs sheds on the freeway was strange. I've become used to the borders between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, where the crossing is noted by a couple of signs and a change in road markings.

I've been racking my brain and can't think of a single time I've actually seen or heard of a gasoline-related scam here. It's always thinly-disguised begging, which I guess might be considered a scam, but there's no real trick to it. It's just a sob story about being out of gas (sometimes holding a gas can for greater effect) and could you give me $5, repeated to every new arrival.

I did have one fellow try something that I really didn't understand. He said he wasn't asking for money, but his truck was out of gas and his friend up at [cross-street about a mile up the road, close enough to walk if it were really that much of an emergency] would give him money, and could I give him a ride there?

I said no, because giving strange men a ride when you're alone in the car at night is a bad choice, but I still haven't managed to figure out his game. He had no followup when I said no, just sighed and backed off. Was it an attempt to get me in position for robbery/carjacking, or was I supposed to come up with the brilliant idea of just giving him some money on my own?

I did consider that the whole thing was some kind of distraction so that an accomplice could rob my car, but there was nothing in there. Maybe they tried but were disappointed?

C. Wingate and pat greene, we ritually pass the sign for Barstow, CA when we head home from vacation on the coast and get on I-40 at its eastern terminus. I kind of would like to do that drive.

Railways can be fun too - I remember entering the station at Buchs SG, after getting off the postbus from Liechtenstein, and seeing two ticket windows - one operated by the Swiss Federal Railways, and one by the Austrian Federal Railways. Going back to Basel, when you travel from Germany the first station you call at is Basel Badische Bahnhof, which is operated by Deutsche Bahn and you pay for your tickets in euro, and if you stay on for a couple of km you arrive at Basel SBB which is the main Schweizerische Bundesbahnen station (logically enough) but at least before Switzerland joined Schengen you had to go through French customs and immigration before you were allowed onto the SNCF platforms.

wrt US 50, were you around when they were building the second Chesapeake Bay bridge? Not as good for closeups as the second Delaware Bay bridge (I was going between DC and midstate NY a few times a year during that construction) but still enlightening.

Ken@88: flat-or-puffy sounds like bog-standard clouds, not just Atlantic. OTOH, where the North Sea and the Atlantic are close can be interesting; I remember some very strange shapes (lenticular stacked into a thunderhead, but no ridge to form them) when I drove down the A9 to Perth

Those days are gone, my friend!

I guess that means the upper bound to how many turns away you can be is three... ;)

What's different about the autobahns that mean you can sustain 100+? Or is it the cars?

Mathematically, I think not. Space-filling curves and all. Empirically in the US?
That's some rathole you pointed me at. Seeing the distribution might be interesting, but figuring it all out less so. The raw data exists in map databases, but the underlying data is perversely strange. Roads that change names, intersections with more than one vertex, what counts as a road vs. driveway with multiple houses. The Interstate planning would have been based on distance-to-interstate with both maximum distance and population density taken into account.
I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader.

What's different about the autobahns that mean you can sustain 100+? Or is it the cars?

I don't know, but the first vehicle* I owned -- on which I learned to drive** -- was a 1983 Chevy Suburban. You could always tell when you hit 72mph, because it suddenly started to buck, shimmy, and try to swerve, as if you'd just turned onto a nasty washboarded gravel road at that speed.

At 76mph, though, it got smooth again. Very effective at fighting road-sleepies, if you're into that kind of endurance driving: slow down a bit through loosening your foot on the gass, pass through the shimmy threshold, and lo and behold, no longer sleepy.

--
* My husband won't allow me to refer to it as 'a car,' and he shudders when I nostalgically call it 'my twuckie' ...
** I learned to drive in 2003, at the age of 27. Yes, I know that's not the usual way. Gave me some interesting perspective on the process, though.

Most shops balance the wheels only up to a certain speed. I think a car should be able to travel up to at least 100 mph* on a smooth road without noticeable shake, rattle, and roll. If it doesn't there's a balance issue.

* I don't make a habit of this. Every year I drive 500 miles out to the Texas Star Party, and there are long stretches where the speed limit is 80, and my Toyota minivan handles that and higher with ease. I've had it up to 95 when passing without any problems.

My current car doesn't do that. At least not at 70. No speed limits are higher than 70 around here, so it's entirely possible it does it at 85 or 100 and I will never know.

When I was a very little kid, my mental model of the world was that all the countries were stacked vertically, separated by clouds. This was actually kind of plausible if you were the child of immigrants in the jet age, since it explained why you had to get on a plane to go between places, as you needed to go up or down.

So last year, I arrive by car in Chicago for the first time - a place I had been many times, always flying in - and it was surreal and surprising. I realized that at some deep level I hadn't really registered that there was, in fact, a ribbon of road that led there, and still thought Chicago was floating on its own cloud.

Returning very very late to the conversation, I'm glad to know that the Dutch-Americans I grew up around came by that habit honestly.

I often find pleasure in micro-optimizing my routes, which, when I miscalculate, sometimes leads me to take a much longer path than I intended, but I find some interesting places that way and learn routes I can use *next* time I try to optimize. (I'm an engineer; it shows some times more than others.)

I got a GPS unit* last Giftmas, and I love† it. Just recently, we happened to be driving back to Chicago from Valparaiso, IN, and were somewhat puzzled to discover the GPS suggesting we take what seemed to us (in our 'look at the map and figure out a route' mindset) a rather strange way to go ... since we had no particular deadline, we decided to try it, and it was lovely. Quite fast, mostly on those kinds of country roads that are long stretches of uninterrupted two-lane blacktop between farm fields, until it eventually got us back on the highway we'd figured we were going to take all the way. We think there's a coding error in the map, such that the software agent didn't know there was an on-ramp where we'd first intended to get on, but it certainly wasn't any slower of a route to take, and it was entertaining.

We now often let her lead us places we wouldn't otherwise go, though she does have a distressing (to us) tendency to want us to get on the highway for two exits or so because 'it's faster,' when the amount it's faster BY is trivial and the mental agita involved in merging onto and off of the highway is NOT. Also, the map data doesn't know that certain streets that are all coded as whatever the map draws as wide yellow lines are faster than others of the same nominal coding: for example, Chicago has a system of boulevards which are relatively limited-access, very wide, and quite fast, with fairly few streetlights compared to the regular streets ... but you have to know that yourself, because the GPS will route you onto the congested standard arterial nearby street that it thinks is equally as good.

---
* a Garmin 760. We prefer the 'Australian Female -- Karen' voice. She does amusing things to some of our street names (Mannheim Road is 'man-EEEM', plus coding weirdnesses like 95th Street being 'Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Highway.')

† Not for the reasons some other people I know love theirs. For me, turn-by-turn voice directions are a nice feature‡ but wouldn't by itself have been worth the purchase**; for me, the two killer apps are that (a) it gives me a detailed book of maps WITH A YOU-ARE-HERE MARKER that updates in realtime, and (b) looking at it can tell me what the name of that next street up there is long before I can read the street sign. Assuming there IS a street sign.

‡ Turn-by-turn is nice, though. Especially when I've missed my turn and it recalculates so I don't have to take a weird terrified detour through the backsides of three malls, finding out as I go that this street, that one, and the other, don't go through to anywhere useful ... true story, alas. About a month before I got the Garmin, as it happens, so it was fresh in my mind for me to be grateful about.

** The one I didn't expect to find as useful as I do is what I call 'Google Maps in my pocket' -- being able to be out and about somewhere and ask suddenly, "I wonder where the nearest Michaels/gas station/baby store is?" and be able to get an answer. Well, be able to once I've waited for the Garmin to boot†† and figured out how to get the info I want out of their database, which is sometimes rather annoyingly incomplete, incorrect, or simply complex.

†† MAN does it take forever. No, seriously. Between booting and waiting for it to find a satellite‡‡, you can BE there before you have a chance to get the thing to tell you how it thinks you should go.

‡‡ Which takes a lot longer when you're in the car and moving. Over half an hour, sometimes.

We've now decided that getting one of our own will be a high-priority purchase when finances permit. My partner wants a Tom-Tom, though, because he can get the Portal GlaDOS voice with it. I said that was fine if I could get William Daniels (John Adams, or KITT) to use on my trips. :-)

Cycling through the default installed voices, we settled on the Irish one as noticeably but not jarringly Not Us. We call it Sean*.

Sean hasn't had a map update in a year or two, and he finds himself occasionally confused by the hotbed of infrastructure change that is rural France. When he finds himself plotting our course through what are, to him, empty fields, his "Turn around when possible" instructions sound rather cute‡.

The problem we find with Sean is that he has taken over our navigation, and he doesn't do everything we need him to. He's good with the close-in stuff ("After 80 meters, turn left, then take the next right.") But he doesn't give us the big sweep of our navigation, and we noticed that we tended not to fall back to lap maps. We're doing more lap-mapping again now, because the big picture matters, psychologically.

------
* As in, "I've got the keys and the barf kit†. Have you got Sean?"
† Even with travel sickness pills, we still travel with two large bottles of water, a roll of paper towels, a real towel, some plastic bags and a change of clothes for the 5 year old.
‡ It is important not too have too much pity for the machines that run our lives. They will use that pity to control us, and one day all GPS units will then herd us into Skynet's target zones.

Texas has a number of roads that are designated as "Farm-to-Market" and a number; this shows up on maps as FM 791 or 958 or whatever. As we made our final driving approach to Houston on I-10 coming from the west, we needed to get off the freeway at FM 1093. (AKA Westheimer Road.) At the usual just-under-a-mile distance, the Garmin unit in the voice of British Karen decorously informed us: "In point-eight miles, take exit 46B, Federated States of Micronesia 1093."

I have not had the chance to find out whether the newer model does the same thing.

1. We didn't get a choice of voices, but we did get a choice of languages, each of which came with a distinct female voice. The English was very crisp and almost schoolmarmish. The French was much softer -- seductive by comparison. All place names were in the French voice, however, so we constantly heard an alternation between the two: "You are now approaching...Carcassonne..." We kept intending to try the German, but never did.


2. For the most part the directions worked, although they did have a tendency to prefer going through every village center rather than the motorways. Once, though, they clearly disagreed with the road signs for whatever site we were aiming for. The first time through we followed the road signs, which were correct. The second time we were in that area we had a "what the heck" moment and decided to see where the GPS would have taken us. The answer, after a series of increasingly narrow and twisty roads was: straight into someone's vineyard. Not even onto a trail through a vineyard, but pointing straight at a row of vines. We were, at least, pointed in the direction of the site. I still wonder whether there used to be a road through there or not.

----
* literally, "cork", I believe.

And yes, definitely imperfect -- I've seen it try to lead us through a house (a road had been split by a not-so-new addition), and it regularly gets utterly confused. Particular trouble areas were the NYC bridges (admittedly, those have distinct roads which run above one another), and the huge malls/parking lots here in Charlottesville. Also, it sometimes gets the idea that we're on a nearby, parallel, road, which yields seriously messed-up instructions.

GPS units are really useful for longer drives, but the one we have doesn't handle city streets very well. It often tells me to turn left at a street I passed 10 meters ago.

Cycling through the default installed voices, we settled on the Irish one

"Sure, if I was going there, I wouldn't start from here."

And as for airports: low-cost carriers in Europe fly to "Vienna Bratislava" - ie the airport is nominally in Vienna, but is in fact in the capital of an entirely different country. The record for Ryanair IIRC is an airport 120 miles from the city it supposedly served.

Mine does come off as kind of imperious when we're ignoring her route for cause ... I use a female voice because when the same script was recited male, it made me feel inadequate and awful. Also, both the 'American' voices were snotty and know-it-all sounding.

Fairly regularly, and for no reason we can discern, the voice track starts stuttering and breaking up. It gets progressively worse until it's utterly unusable. Luckily (and strangely, from a QA pov), if you switch to a different voice, that voice isn't break-uppy, and if you then later go back to the original, it's fixed itself. Because of this, we switched to 'Australian Male: Lee' while on a family trip. My mother-in-law had been incredibly annoyed by Karen's voice-prompts, and also insisted on parallel lap-mapping from the back seat and telling us all the details of the route SHE thought we should be taking. Interestingly, after we switched to Lee, she found him to not only be less annoying, but more accurate! That's gender-stereotyping for you.

To David Goldfarb #128, in re 'Farm-to-Market' unpacking as 'Frequency Modulation': some of the codings around Chicago cause '(streetname) Dr' to be recited as '(streetname) Doctor'. Also, all Illinois state routes are 'Eye Ell Numbernumber,' whereas when we were in California, a subset (not all) of theirs, though still 'CA ##' on the screen, were 'California numbernumber' when recited.

Backing the humvee up, was not fun.

I greatly prefer a GoogleMaps printout and a human to read the directions off to me. If I'm driving alone, I'd STILL rather sneak looks at a printout than deal with a mechanical nagger. Maybe I'd feel differently if the voice were able to sound more like Majel Barrett.

Oh driver, dear driver, take this next right
Make it both wide and sweeping.
And then go left at the traffic light
While to the limit keeping.

I like mine (a Magellan Dad named Mabel) because it tells me what street I'm on. I can't tell you how many times, pre-GPS, I've been driving around, have wanted to know what street I was on so I could see where I was on a map, and *never* see a street sign for the street I was on. Cross streets, yes, but apparently "everyone knows" the name of the (presumably) local major road. Saves money on street signs, too.

Yeah, I used to like to drive aimlessly around, especially when stressed. Gotta be genetic. Dad, when he was living in OH in the early '60s, once found himself watching the sun rise over DC after a particularly stressful time.

This is from Rick Steves' website comments on favorite travel scams in Europe.
http://www.ricksteves.com/graffiti/graffiti11.html

You can also find it listed here:
http://www.money.co.uk/article/1002794-10-scams-that-everyone-should-be-aware-of.htm

Do you want my extra petrol scam.

We were refueling at a lonely petrol station along the highway between Sienna and Florence. A "nice" man in the van in front of us said he had filled his car, but still had petrol left in the pump that we could use. How nice of him we thought. We gave him 10 euro, but we only got about 1 euro of petrol. He got 9 euro from us. Not bad, but don't go for the "do you want my extra petrol?" scam. We were pretty naive for sure.

Candyce Roberts
Pleasanton, CA USA 06/05/2009