the garmin 2599 (incomprehensible model numbering scheme) gps has saved us on this trip, some thoughts and observations:

  1. it gets confused if you don’t get onto a major road at the beginning and tries to correct with silly single track roads (at least here in Southern France). Solution: look at a paper map and/or google maps and orient yourself at your starting point and use that orientation to make sure you get on the major road at the beginning!
  2. without the gps which we have nicknamed ‘millifred’ for its british accent, we wouldn’t have made it to the very hard to find hotel la garenne in labeaume!
  3. the garmin link feature from the iPhone is great except when bluetooth on the iPhone screws up! then you have to re-pair it with Bluetooth
  4. the dash mount is better than the suction cup but i’m still not sure how it stays mounted since there seems to be a lack of ‘stickiness’
  5. glad we bought the expensive ($CAN300) “european and north american maps for life” garmin because i wouldn’t have figured out the car gps in my jet lagged state! (and we weren’t supposed to get a car with gps)
  6. my brother said use google maps; judging by the lack of cell phone connectivity here in southern france i don’t think that would have been a great solution (unless i use google maps’ kludgey offline support which s*cks in North America let alone France); the garmin gets a gps fix in about 10 seconds and doesn’t need cell phone data and has offline maps. maybe google maps will fix this in a few years but i’m not holding my breath
  7. even though i updated the garmin maps with the june 2015 map update, there are still missing roads and roundabouts (from I guess may 2015 or earlier) but nothing that you can’t figure out. Would be curious to know if google maps gets updated more frequently
  8. the garmin doesn’t say “route recalculation”. instead you have to see it display recalculating which is a crazy bug if you ask me!
  9. would i buy the garmin again? yes, it’s imperfect but although we still got lost our getting lost is much less than it would have been if we had relied on google maps or paper maps!

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