Fun with Tim and Jane

Alternative title: Beating the TomTom

Because we bought our HTC Touch Diamonds on eBay (see earlier April post), we have two different satnav systems. Peter has Garmin, I have TomTom. After using them for a while, we have decided that TomTom wins on points, although each has its merits. In particular, Garmin seems superior when one wants to be a pedestrian. We navigate with TomTom mostly, but occasionally have both on. One has a choice of voice, and initially we both selected "Jane", a gentle English female voice, and managed on couple of occasions to contrive the situation where we had both machines operating and the same voice was alternately saying "Turn right", "Turn left". I switched my TomTom over to "Tim" (English male), so that if we have both on, we can tell which one is talking to us.

On arrival, Tim/Jane says "You have reached your destination". Often this is just the centre of town, and our actual destination is the first nice-looking restaurant. Once parked, Tim/Jane tries to guide us back to town centre. Once when entering a restaurant through a not very attractive bar, causing us to look questioningly at one another, a loud voice from my handbag suddenly said "Turn around when possible". After that embarrassment we took care to turn off the satnav as we got out of the car.

Old fashioned technology in the form of paper maps is still the best for journey planning - it is easier to see a large area in one go (similar to using paper charts for planning on the boat). And it provides a backup if the technology fails, so we purchased the very reasonably priced Michelin atlas covering all France. On the subject of driving, our little Renault Modus diesel is a great success - easy to drive and very economical. We are getting about 1000km from its 50l tank. I drove the first 350 km from Paris to our gite. Peter has done most of the driving since while I navigate, but I drive from time to time to keep my hand in. We're doing pretty well, but there have been been two occasions when I've had to shout stop because Peter hadn't remembered to look left and a car was bearing down upon us, once at a speed that would have been lethal had he kept going.