Don’t trust your GPS!

I’m ba…aack!!  Aren’t you all thrilled?   Hope someone missed me

We had the most gorgeous time! But man, oh man, our trip down was LOOONNNGG and the reason… the GPS led us astray… totally!

It took us basically the entire day to get there and it should be about 6 and a half or 7 hour trip!  And that is NOT fun with a toddler and a 4 year-old in the car… TRUST ME!  AAARRRGGHHH!

We had planned on stopping at Mooi River for breakfast because that’s the last big stop available before the coast, but we missed the turnoff.  Or rather, Lance did… I’d fallen asleep for 5 minutes.  But then again, he’s useless with navigation and I’m always the one who has to look out for places and directions etc.

So, we think… no worries.  We know there’s a shopping mall next to the freeway in Pietermaritzburg called Liberty Midlands Mall.  We didn’t however, know which offramp it was…. so again… we think… no worries… WE have a GPS!!  Hmmphhh fat lot of good that did us.

Lance looks up the mall, and can only find one shop listed there on the map… Cape Union Mart.  So, we punch in that location as a “via point”.  Next thing this damn machine, takes us on a wild goose chase around Pietermaritzburg until we’re on a tiny dirt track facing… yes… you guessed it… towards the freeway we were on 5 minutes before!  PMSL! 

And the best part… we wound our way back to the offramp… only to find that there is no on-ramp at that particular spot, so we had to try trust the GPS to navigate our way through the MIDDLE of Pietermaritzburg to get out!

We ended up finding a tiny Wimpy in the middle of town to get some lunch because by then Connor was SCREAMING for food.

We managed to get back onto the freeway an HOUR AND A HALF later!!  What a WASTE of TIME!

The moral of the story… a GPS does not know it all… the best thing is still to follow your nose!

Ohhh, and I almost forgot… we tried the damn GARMIN again today… with similar proposterous results!!  This time however, we didn’t follow it. LOL!

This time, we got stuck in one almight traffic jam just outside Harrismith because of a truck accident.  The trucks were winding all the way up the hill.  We were completely stuck, but thought that if the cars moved a bit we could get to the dual carriageway, do a u-turn and then find another route.

So Lance gets busy on the Garmin to find out what detour we could take.  And guess what the answer was?  Turn right in 3 metres!!  Yip, 3 metres!!  That would mean driving the car over the crash barriers, down a donga in the veld, through a barb wire fence and a small stream to get to the other side of the road to back track!  INSANE MACHINE!  We just laughed this time, and carried on waiting.

OK, more about our holiday tomorrow… I’ve got 300 odd posts in my reader to catch up on! 

PS. the photo was taken on Van Reenens Pass on the way down just before I lost my sense of humour