The forum wasn't very helpful. That's OK! Anyway, I thought some of the "viewers" might like an update on my big adventure with my new navigation system.
My problem wasn't knowing the route, in general - although I rarely take it. I knew that. My problem was finding and negotiating the roads bypassing business districts in several little cities between my home and Raleigh NC. And my big problem was hitting the right exits on the confusing (to "foreigners") freeway ring-roads in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill complex.
At the beginning, after entering Home and Destination, I started "Guidance." Things went wrong almost immediately. The "guidance lady" wanted me to take some road headed north. I wanted to go west. Checking the numbers in the readout, I saw that a trip was envisioned that was about 50 miles farther, and 90 minutes longer, than the 150 minutes trip I knew the drive to be.
Thinking about it a little later, I concluded that Guidance likes Big Roads. If you aren't on a Big Road, it is programmed to get you to one ASAP. Well, that's the wrong approach for a region like rural East Carolina. We have few Big Roads, and hardly any of these go east and west (or anywhere must people want to go).
The Guidance Lady seemed annoyed at my intransigence. She said nothing for quite awhile. Meanwhile, my wife and I got what info we could from the map. Occasionally it helped, like giving the distance to a turn or exit. Once we arrived near the Raleigh metro area, we hoped things would improve, nav-wise. Mostly, they didn't; they might have got worse. There was so much extraneous rubbish (as it seemed to me) on the screen that it left little space for the map with roads and exits. There's probably a way to remove unwanted info from the display. But I couldn't figure it out on-the-fly, as it were.
My preliminary conclusions are, (1) Don't use the navigation system unless you really don't know, and don't care, how to travel to your destination. And (2) if you have questions about navigation, don't come to this forum looking for answers. Ask your teen son or daughter, or your "wired" next-door neighbor who's up to speed on all things tech (especially if he's a fisherman B) ).
