Knowing where you are, exactly

Mark got a GPS gadget for his birthday recently – Todd’s great idea – and now we know exactly where we are. We also know how fast we are going and at what elevation, how much time we spent stopped, and what direction we were going in when we were actually going. This has been particularly useful on the perfectly straight old-railroad-bed trail we walk on now and then. We walk at a 3.2-mph pace and when my feet start to hurt sufficiently we simply turn around until we get back to our car, so it really hasn’t been critical that we are using GPS but… Mark likes gadgets. Mark REALLY likes gadgets.

It appears to me, the uninitiated and un-geek-y, that all that the GPS screen really tells us, out in the boonies as we are, is that we are in the middle of nowhere. As in: a dot on an otherwise blank screen that says “you are here.” Uninformative, to say the least. Remember that Mark and I are the ones who walk around cities with a compass and a map and invariably head off in the wrong direction anyway because we have the map upside-down or have managed to reason that the compass is being affected by some powerful, unknown magnetic force and that North is really the way we ‘feel’ that it is, instead of the way the compass says.

Perhaps with the correct download of data this GPS thing will help us but right now it is just a conversation piece. Although I have to say that I thought our discussions were brighter and more entertaining before, with topics other than “how fast do you think we are going now?” Even smart remarks about latitude can leave me wondering how to hold up my end of the conversation.

And Mark keeps insisting: “You have to admit, it’s much better than a PDA.”

I do?