My blog titles are mostly musical references. This is a blog about GPS systems, I think. I did toy with the idea of writing one about the brake problems some participants in our European Grinnall Scorpion tour have been having. A good title for that would have been “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”, I suppose.
We’re almost at the end of our Grinnall Tour. What’s left of the main group have left us, and hurried off north today, theoretically via the Nurbürgring, with a ferry tonHull to catch tomorrow. I planned a great line through the Black Forest, from south to north, before an overnight stop on the French/German border. I emphasise “planned”, because for two (occasionally connected) reasons, we were frequently thwarted.
I’ve been a GPS user for many years – what the geeks call an “early adopter”. I’ve seen GPS systems become more sophisticated, and “GPS Jane” has become a permanent member of the entourage on most of my journeys to the further flung places. I’ve also become pretty discerning about what I want from a GPS system – things like good, clear instructions, the minimum of chatter, rapid re-routing, and so on. I use a system on my smartphone these days. One less box of tricks to worry about or plumb in to the car or bike electrics. It also means a bluetooth connection takes care of making the sound audible inside a crash helmet or headset, alongside music.
But my system has become very picky. The system preferences are all set to give me full choice of locations, but Jane has started to decide which routes she regards as impassable. I first noticed this while plotting the route for one of the days on our tour. Jane had apparently taken against the Oberalp Pass in Switzerland. It’s a great mountain road, and I’ve driven it several times, but this year, Jane routed around it. A detour, had we taken it, of about a hundred miles. I put in a waypoint on the road up the pass – the road showed on the mapping – but the best Jane would do was drive up to the waypoint, and insist then on a U turn back to her detour. I put another waypoint on the road down on the other side of the pass. The result was a tortuous route visiting both waypoints, but never going over the mile or so at the top of the pass to connect them.
I’ll concede this was an irritation but not that common a problem….until we got to the Black Forest. There are great roads to ride and drive in the Black Forest, but the best routes are not continuous and need to be pieced together via numerous waypoints. Those were easy to plot. I knew the roads I wanted, and which roads and towns I wanted to avoid. Jane, unfortunately, had other ideas. What ought to have looked like a basically direct south-north line on the map looked more like a Christmas tree, with routes shown up as far as various waypoints, followed by an immediate return back in the opposite direction.
With patience, I added several other waypoints and gradually straightened the route out. We set off, but within five miles, hit a road that was closed owing to road works. It did not offer a deviation route. Unhelpful. We turned around, drove back to the last roundabout and guessed an alternative. This was the cue for Jane’s other foible. Unlike her namesake on some other systems, who eventually get the hint that we’re not going to a particular waypoint after all, our Jane becomes obsessed with trying to get us exactly (and only) to our waypoints, often by prodigious feats of re-routing. The only way to persuade her that things have changed, and that we need to skip a waypoint is to go into the software and delete the now inaccessible waypoints(s).
And, like the plot of a theatrical farce, Jane then re-routed selectively and discontinuously, until we added yet further waypoints manually to force her hand.
Today, sadly, our route encountered about six significant sections affected by closed roads and major roadworks. We got precious little warning of most of them. We’d reach a key junction and find the road we needed was blocked. Several blockages like this suggested no alternative route. We were being driven crazy by what ought to have been a simple re-routing process. And wouldn’t you know it? We then we also met several sections of road Jane deemed completely impassable. She chose her moments badly, and was frequently over-ridden, despite sharp warnings to “Turn around when possible”.
The B500, for example, is a great and deservedly popular road. Parts of it give the best motoring in the Black Forest. It’s a bit discontinuous overall, often becoming the B28 or un-numbered roads. It also has loads of sections with daft slow speed limits, which are no doubt an over-reaction to a past catalogue of road accidents. But it exists, and really can be driven. Over Jane’s dead body, apparently. I need a word with the GPS system creators when (or if) we get home, because otherwise, a beautiful relationship will be ending in tears.
One more Grinnall Euro Tour-related blog to come.