Please Don't Squeeze the Garmin

Second day. We're trailing a boat, for the first time in more than thirty years. And for a lot longer trip - the longest we did it before was from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to Wayne, New Jersey. But this is from Naperville, Illnois, to Rome, Maine, almost 1200 miles! We're overprepared, having planned and plotted out this trip for months. But we find that we need all these newfangled tools: we triangulate between the GPS (which is perfect and accurate, so far, and terrific when you are approaching a complicated set of roads, like the approach to any city or beltway), the atlas (which gives you the big, multi-state picture, as well as detailed state maps), and the Triple A state guides, which list hundreds of hotels with all of their attendant information. How did my parents ever find hotels when we went on (fairly rare) road trips with six people in the car? I know - we saw them from the road, drove up, and found out if they had a room. If they didn't, we asked for a recommendation and drove on. Weird-sounding, I know. The atlases and Triple A info haven't changed much, but I can't imagine a trip without a phone now, and by the end of this one, we'll be hooked on the Garmin. Gary, who considers himself a human GPS, was not convinced that it was what he really wanted for his birthday (I kept telling him yes, it was!). Plunk him down in any city in the country, and he can find his way to the airport, to the interstate, to a restaurant of our choice. But no one can know the exact route to everywhere. When we drove to Maine and Quebec in 1968, with four kids in the car, aged 11 to 18, and two adults, we joked that we drove 13 hours to Bar Harbor, half of it backing up. Very little backing up with a GPS. It has authority. Believe it. It's right.