Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Navigating in France

One thing I've been a bit worried about is driving around France. We have rented a car for a week, and will be doing a considerable amount of driving. Unfortunately, I will not be able to use my phone for navigation because of the ridiculous cost of data roaming, and I have no other form of navigation for the car available. I do have a Garmin eTrex HCx GPS unit that I got for geocaching, but it does not have detailed street maps loaded, and certainly not for France.

Because of this, I bought a giant Michelin road map at Barnes & Noble for $12. This was what I planned to use until I remembered that Avis allows you to rent a GPS unit for your car. For some reason, I thought I remembered it being about $3/day, which compared to a $12 map was only a few dollars more for a week's rental. Unfortunately, when I went to the Avis web site to add the GPS to my car, it turned out that the units cost $13/day! Over $90 for GPS maps?! I don't think so!

Stymied there, I thought I might download a map of France for my Garmin. Turns out they cost $70.  Stymied again!

So it looks like I'm stuck going old school, although I think there is a way to set up a route on my iPhone's Motion X Drive app and cache it over wifi so that it will still work when you don't have phone service. I will try this out, but there's a good chance that Nathan and I will be driving all over France with him in the passenger seat trying to figure out where we are on our giant $12 map.

No comments:

Post a Comment