The Outdoors: GPS forges path for next generation of travelers

July 18, 2008 03:01 am

— I bought my first Global Positioning System receiver more than a decade ago.
It was expensive, had a prodigious appetite for AA batteries, and by today’s standards, was pretty basic.
There are no internal map data bases, overlays, on-line capabilities or other bells and whistles.
Basically, all it does is tell you in longitude and latitude where you are, where you’ve been, and how to get back home.
As basic as it is, it remains a remarkable instrument.
It once led me several hundred miles, down the highway through the darkness and then on foot through the woods to a Nebraska hillside where a pile of feathers marked the exact spot my brother killed a wild turkey days earlier.
It has led me across miles of a frozen, snow-covered South Dakota lake to a perch hotspot we had discovered several weeks prior.
After following the cursor to the waypoint, we scraped through the featureless foot-deep snow to reveal our re-frozen holes, marked with the shells of the pistachio nuts we had snacked on between fish bites on our first trip.
Of course, today’s GPS units not only are less expensive. They also are more user-friendly with built-in data maps, on-line capabilities, restaurant guides and computer-generated voice guidance.
The advent of those GPS units designed for use in motor vehicles now seem to have supplanted the traditional compass for those of us who are, from time to time, directionally disabled.
If there has been an traditional sign of the advancing age of the motoring male population, it has been when a compass, usually a fancy Airguide model, invariably found its way to the dashboard of the family sedan.
For some inexplicable reason, perhaps having endured decades of listening to unsolicited directions and advice from our wives in those rare instances we momentarily are unsure of our whereabouts, we suddenly feel the need to have one of the instruments on-board.
My grandpa always had an Airguide compass mounted dead-center on his dashboard; somehow, one mysteriously appeared on my dad’s pickup truck dashboard as he grew older.
Several years ago, I climbed into a co-worker’s vehicle and chided him about his advancing age when I spotted the gleaming Airguide standing tall on his dashboard.
Not too long ago, he told me he replaced his trusty compass with a fancy, new GPS unit — one that projects a colored map of his location and gave him turn-by-turn directions to his selected destination.
The technology, I agreed, was pretty amazing.
But since I don’t happen to have one of those fancy units, I couldn’t resist asking.
“Tell me,” I said, “Is the voice giving you the directions a man or a woman?”
“A woman,” he said.
Some things never change.

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