Growing up I always used to love family trips. A bit of sun, sand and ice cream; a nice sing-song; maybe a rollercoaster or two. An uncomfortable dip in the freezing, polluted sea; a nasty bout of the runs in a caravan chemical toilet; the chance to relentlessly bully my little sister and get relentlessly bullied by my big brother.

But there was one thing that really entertained us without fail: the obligatory map-reading fiasco. Some of the finest arguments I’ve ever witnessed occurred in the front of our car, usually to a bizarrely ill-fitting soundtrack of Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years (thanks for that, Dad). So it’s with great sadness that I realise I’ll never repeat the great shows put on by my parents.

You see, over the last few days I’ve driven nearly 1,400 miles around the UK on a bit of a mountain climbing quest, and the journeys were, it has to be said, uneventful. And it’s all the fault of my car’s newest shiny gadget, its very own 1.21-Jigawatt flux capacitor, if you will. Also known as TomTom.

From London to Edinburgh; Edinburgh to Fort William; Fort William to the Peak District; from there to Snowdon, and finally back to London - TomTom was in control. Copious helpings of Red Bull and Pro Plus aside, the only genuine excitement I got was pranging the back of a Volvo in a service station at 2mph - and even then TomTom knew every slip road to guide us back out of the car park to the motorway.

And the worst part is that I absolutely loved it. I’m totally, utterly sold. Combine this with a Garmin GPS watch, which kept us updated on exactly how high up our three peaks we’d climbed, and I can safely say my limited map-reading skills will now be going the same way as my handwriting and my ability to remember phone numbers.

I know that’s not a good thing, I know gadgets are eroding old skills that we should all have, but when they make life so easy I really can’t muster up the effort to complain.

My only nagging doubt is that somewhere there’s a giant uberTomTom hooked up to a PS3, playing Gran Turismo and learning to actually drive the routes it knows so well. When that happens, when we all sit back and give up the driving to the real experts, I plan to retire in style.

Anyone know where I can buy a DeLorean?

Tags: flux capacitor, Garmin, GPS, satnav, TomTom

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.