hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1527.txt

Episode: 1527
Title: HPR1527: Surviving A Roadtrip: GPS
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1527/hpr1527.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:41:16

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Hmmm?
Hello, this is Windigo, and I'm submitting an episode about surviving a road trip.
For you see, I have had many opportunities to develop some survival techniques for very
long journeys.
In early 2013, me and my girlfriend took a road trip that ended up spanning 8,890 miles
or 14,307 kilometers or 563,270,400 inches, you know, whatever metric you like and allowed
us to see the United States a little bit more.
We were looking for a place to settle down and couldn't really agree on what climate
or area that we both could agree on.
So we took a whirlwind tour of the entire U.S. and ended up settling on Northern California,
but that is neither here nor there.
This episode is about surviving trips like that.
So for a little background, my girlfriend and I have been in a long distance relationship
up until a year ago.
We've known each other for nine years, and that means for eight of it, I was driving
back and forth to Massachusetts where she lived, which is four hours from my previous
home.
And then a couple years ago, my girlfriend moved to Arizona to take a teaching position
in a very rural town in southern Arizona, and that required driving across the country
with all of her belongings in a 10-foot U-Haul, which was a little bit of an adventure.
I had never driven that far before.
We had never done anything like that.
I had never driven a vehicle like that, but we made it.
We made it to her destination in time for her to start school, and that was the beginning
of my realization that I would be driving an awful lot for the rest of my life.
So these techniques that I've developed are really more of a survival guide for me, but
I think they could be handy for anyone else who also drives a decent amount of distance,
either regularly or just on these special trips.
Anyways, I've split these recommendations into a couple categories.
I think I'm going to do one per episode, so today will be navigation, and I'll cover
the rest in another episode or two.
These different categories are navigation, power or electricity, internet, and food.
All of these different aspects are very important when you're traveling on the road quite a
bit, and I think that's a good way to split up the series.
So to begin with, let's start with navigation.
Navigation, of course, covers just getting yourself to and fro to different destinations.
I am particularly fond of a GPS.
They automatically calculate your route.
They do audible directions, which is invaluable when you don't know where you are, and you
need to keep your eyes on the road.
But GPS will really only take you so far, so you need to know a couple things in addition
to the pre-programmed routes and how to follow directions.
I have the envious position of having a good navigator because my girlfriend does not
drive.
This might add a little bit of background to why I became so good at taking long drives.
She doesn't drive herself for very good reasons I might add, but that leaves most of the
travel to me.
She does not drive, but she's an excellent navigator.
Usually when we're in the car, she will be working the GPS, and if we need to make an
exception or take a side trip, she's the one who sets that up.
It makes a huge difference if you're not trying to fiddle with things while trying to get
one way or the other.
Also, whether you have a navigator or not, you should definitely know how to operate your
GPS.
This covers just planning a normal route where you set the destination and go to it.
This covers things like alternate routes.
For instance, when we were in Louisiana, there was a bridge closing, so we needed to figure
out how to get our GPS to tell us how to go to where we were going without using that bridge.
Finding food can be done with your GPS.
It's an excellent way to be able to locate things in an area you're unfamiliar with, as
long as you know how to operate it.
Other very important factors in using a GPS are the maps that you use.
There's been a couple of HPRs about updating your GPS maps, I think in particular there
was a Garmin episode, which is great for me because I happen to own a Garmin GPS.
So keeping your maps up to date could be the difference between getting stuck in a construction
zone or five mile an hour traffic and being on your way.
So there are things like toll information programmed into a GPS, which is very important
if you don't want to pay an arm in a lake.
One thing that we discovered on our trip is that the northeast is just absolutely bonkers
when it comes to tolls.
We ended up hopping on a toll road and paid almost $30 in tolls, and that could have easily
been avoided if we had set up our GPS to do that.
So in the mid East Coast region, there is an entire several mile long bridge that ends
up being $20 if you want to cross it.
So that would have been at least important to know if we weren't prepared for that sort
of thing because it's very difficult if you just don't have that kind of money to back
out.
You can't turn around really.
I don't even know what would happen if you didn't have the toll that they were requesting.
So either make sure that you have that kind of money on hand if you don't care about
paying tolls or you can set up your GPS to avoid any tolls such as that.
Well a GPS will automatically take you a bunch of different places if you give it a route
and specify a destination or something like that.
But it's also very important to be able to use your GPS as a map, or if you don't have
a GPS just use a normal map.
One of the best functions of a GPS is just telling you you are here on a specific map
of an area so that you can route yourself.
You don't necessarily have to have the GPS speaking turn right, turn left.
As long as you know where you are in the general vicinity and where you're going or where
you'd like to go, you can get a lot out of just using your GPS as a locator and having
it tell you where you are, what road you're on, which direction you're going.
I even use it to keep an eye on my speed limits because speeds change pretty rapidly in some
areas and I don't always catch the signs.
But if I look down at my GPS every once in a while, every five minutes or so, it will actually
color the speed red if you're going over the speed limit because it has your current
speed because it's the GPS and they can calculate things like that.
But it will have the speed limit as well and that's very important if you're on an unfamiliar
highway and a lot of local police officers love catching tourists.
I grew up in a tourist town and would always see someone with a foreign plate pulled over
to the side of the road.
Why anger the locals when you can just grab somebody from out of town?
So if you don't want that to be you, make sure to at least stay within five miles of
the speed limit, five or ten would be great, but five miles if you can.
Now it's not exactly related to GPS but it might be integrated with your GPS if you're
using a phone for navigation cameras.
This isn't really enough to be on its own as an episode so I'm just going to toss it
in here.
It's like a bonus.
So I like to take pictures on my vacations.
It's good to have a memory to associate with a trip or you can show people, people love
seeing trip pictures.
But if you're driving, taking pictures is not always a simple affair.
I have a quick, easy shot camera that doesn't require like manual at focus or anything
but it's very difficult to get a shot off when you're driving at 65, 75 miles an hour.
So one of the things I do is I keep my camera on landscape mode or actually it has an
adaptive filter that will always take the right kind of macro but I don't tend to use
that.
It kind of messes things up if I'm pointing at something and a reflection from the inside
of the cabin gets in the way so I usually just set it to landscape and leave it because
that's what I'm doing.
I'm taking pictures of landscapes.
So I have that set on my camera and I have my camera accessible because if I see something
I don't want to say oh I'd love to get a picture of that but I have to get my camera
out of the bag or out of its holster and sometimes if I'm in a particularly beautiful
area I'll get my camera ready because I know something is going to come up or I want
to get a picture of the landscape so I'll just keep it powered on and then snap a shot
every 30 seconds or so.
There's a lot you can do to reduce the delay between seeing something and taking a picture.
Again, if you have the benefit of having a navigator they are also built in photographers
if they feel like it so they will often get the better pictures or be able to take pictures
of things that you don't see because you're concerned about the road details which you
should be because obviously a road trip really doesn't go very well if you crash part
way through.
I'm going to throw in one additional GPS trick that I have not tested myself.
Really when we have our GPS it is sitting precariously somewhere in between the two seats
up front which puts it kind of on the parking brake and doesn't really balance well so my
last GPS trick or tip is to get one of those mounting brackets.
Most GPS come with them they mount right onto your windscreen or windshield whatever you
call it.
And it keeps your GPS in visible range without being off to the side or taking your eyes
off the road as much as it would be if you keep it lower in the car.
So I'm going to dust off my mounting bracket and make sure that my GPS is visible and
easy to glance at instead of what usually happens where I have to look straight down into
the car and then look up and make sure I'm not crashing into someone in front of me.
So just make your GPS as convenient to use and view as possible.
They're really really handy and it's made travel so much easier having this little automated
computer that will direct me where I'm going.
I'd also recommend checking into Poké's episodes on GPS because there's probably a whole
world of do-it-yourself and GPS modifications that I do not know about because I've only
had the one.
I think Poké and whoever else has done an episode on GPS is recently probably know a lot
more than I do about using the devices and just the devices themselves.
So you might be able to glean some extra tips off them but I don't think I would go anywhere
without one at this point.
It's just too handy to have a dynamic map that tells you exactly where you are, wherever
you are.
So that's all for this episode.
Let's see.
Next episode I think I'm going to cover electronics.
So power internet, those aspects of the trip because I don't know about the rest of Hacker
public radio but that's very, very important to me.
So until then, make sure to submit your own episode.
We're running a little bit light on HPR episodes right now and quite frankly, I don't want
to listen to me.
I would much rather listen to the episode you're planning.
So send it in, make a Ken Fallon and NY Bill happy or else they'll be after you and that's
everything.
So this has been Windigo.
If you need to contact me, podcast at fragdev.com works or you can hop on status net.
I'm at Windigo or there's a comment section on the HPR website.
So that should give you several options to contact me and tell me that I am completely
wrong in the way I travel.
So until then, this is Windigo signing off.
No, it isn't.
I forgot a tip.
I just wanted to append this to the recording because this is an important one that we found
multiple different times on our long road trip.
Turns out that GPS are not 100% reliable.
So for instance, we were just approaching one of our hotels and our GPS told us to take
a left instead of going into the hotel.
So we said, okay, why not?
So we took a left and then another left and then another left and then we were back at
the hotel and we had just been driven in a circle by a computer.
So a very important aspect of using a GPS is to know when not to use a GPS because sometimes
one of the calculation goes awry and you end up going in a direction that really is not
the right way to go.
For instance, for instance, at our Louisiana Bridge mishap where we had to reroute around
a closed bridge, our GPS ended up taking us down some very, very rural roads.
I mean, not paved rural roads, which is fine if you're into that kind of thing.
But mostly it was just a big hassle.
So if you see your GPS taking you to weird places that you don't think makes any sense,
you might want to second guess it.
There's all sorts of different stories in the news about GPS units driving its owners
off of a bridge and hopefully nobody's that dumb.
But just know when to be skeptical about your GPS.
If you've been traveling on the same highway for a hundred miles and it tells you to take
a left into a tiny little town for no reason, you can probably stay on the highway.
There's been a couple different cases where we've just had to ignore our GPS and keep
on persevering when it just doesn't make any sense what they're trying to tell us.
So if it's trying to take you off into dead end towns or if it's trying to take you onto
teeny tiny little roads, just second guess it.
Take a look at the map, see if that makes any sense and ignore it if it doesn't.
So that's really all.
I look forward to hearing everyone else's HPR episodes.
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