Sunday, September 7, 2014

GPS Blues, Love/Hate relationship

Saturday 9/6/14

Not sure where to begin, but to say that I hate our GPS.  First, we pulled out of our site around 10am, stopped by the dump station to empty out our holding tanks and were on the road around 10:15am to begin our 4hr drive to Nolan Lake State Park.  I had already put the address in both our GPS’s (we have 1 in each of our vehicles).  Now normally I go over the route in both GPS’s to make sure I know where were going, and to make sure the route looks okay to travel with our RV.  Whelp, I skipped that step and paid the price dearly.  The first sign that the trip may not go as smoothly as possible was when the road began to get narrow and we had to zig zag through a small town.  But there was a reward for that when we passed an old covered bridge that had been preserved.  Jami got a picture while driving by and you can see me pulling the RV in front of her.  There was no place to pull over with the RV to get better pictures so this is as good as it gets :)
 

 

The sign said when it was built, I believe 1847 but don’t remember exactly.  Eventually the road did get a little wider, but not much.  We arrived in another town where we had to abandon the GPS to avoid the downtown area where the streets were just too tight so I followed the “truck route” which eventually put us on Hwy 65.  Now you’d think I would pull over and researched the rest of the route, well you’d be wrong.  Down Hwy 65 we go into Louisville, KY to exit 16 which is Hwy 264 I think for 10 mile or so to another exit which turned out to a 4 lane city type street with lots of stores and traffic lights.  This didn’t seem right so finally while sitting at a traffic light looked at the GPS turn by turn directions to see what was next.  WHAT!!!!!  It was taking us back to another Hwy that in turn put us right back onto Hwy 65.  Oh boy, If Jami was able to get to me I think she would have strangled me.  That was at least an hour out of our way.  So FINALLY Between Jami and I talking back and forth on our 2-way radios and looking at the GPS map we both agreed on a route from this point to Nolin Park.  The one thing that is hard to judge on the GPS map is how wide or hilly the road is.  Besides our sour attitudes the rest of the trip went much better although the roads were very narrow and hilly, the roads themselves were in great shape and smooth.  So our 4hr trip turned out to be 5 ½ hrs.   We got parked in our site and set up and of course our AT&T cell service is about non-existent.  We do get 1 bar every so often, but not enough to do anything with. 



We decide to take a trip to a grocery store and hopefully find enough cell signal to Call AT&T and activate an internet air card that we have which also has an antenna we can put on the roof.  Well, we used the GPS J to find the nearest store and off we went.  The closet store on the GPS was about 15 minutes so off we went.  Once we got there we could tell it was out of business, so we went to the next store listed on the GPS, yep, you guessed it, Out of business!  That’s it, we’ve had it!!  We did find some decent cell signal so we pulled over and called AT&T.  The air card I have already has a SIM card in it because I used to use it a few years back for our internet.  I’ll never understand why certain things are the way they are,  but because I used to have service to this air card with the existing SIM card in it and had it turned off they cannot turn it back on until we stop by an AT&T store and get a new SIM card,  WHAT!!!!!    On our way back to the campground we pulled into Nolin Dam recreation area to view the Dam and lick our wounds.  Back at the rig we had dinner, watched the NASCAR race, and off to bed.  Tomorrow were going to do some hiking at Mammoth Caves National Park!!

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