GPS Eulogy

Here it is, the final day of June and I am finally getting around to blogging this month. Not that I was waiting until the last minute or anything, I guess I’ve just been a little busy. In fact I am typing this from the passenger seat of our van as we head for Cheyenne…likely to be uploaded late tonight, just making it in before July begins. Sorry, no pictures to make this blog visual...

I have been thinking about how I should discuss my topic today and I simply haven’t been able to think of any good way to begin, so I’ll just say it. My reliable GPS has likely seen its last trip. For some strange reason, the power button stopped working and with it, all capability to turn it on and retrieve all the waypoints I have collected over the past 6 ½ years. Not only that, but it quit working in the middle or our trip to Minnesota (which I haven’t mentioned before, so I’ll briefly touch on that).

For nearly 6 years I have been telling my friend Nick that I would pay him a visit in Minneapolis. Well, as everyone knows, time seems to slip away and year after year we failed to make any effort to go visit. Finally, back in January we finally started making plans to visit in May. I’m sure Nick and Becca were tired of us discussing travel plans by the time we finally were ready to go…not to mention I’m sure they were ready for us to go home after invading their home for half a week!.. But we had a great time and hope to visit them again soon, hopefully before another six years have passed.

Back to my poor GPS though, while on our trip I was excited to see that my GPS was going to hit 200,000 miles traveled. I watched it hit 199,000 miles and anticipated the next few days when we hit 200,000. However, it wasn’t to be – the curse of 200K found us once again. You might remember when our Subaru broke down and caught on fire while moving back to Nebraska in early 2008? Yup, it was just a few thousand miles over 200,000 as well. I also had a Buick back in college that was slightly over 200,000 miles and the engine seized up and became a redneck lawn ornament. Apparently I am cursed?

We didn’t miss a beat with geocaching though, we picked up a backup GPS a few years back and now it has logged nearly 6000 miles since leaving Minnesota just six weeks ago! With the trip we are making this weekend to Cheyenne and then on to Cody, Wyoming, we are looking at another 1,600+ mile adventure.

I’m going to miss my little old GPS though. Laura gave it to me for my birthday back in 2004 and I haven’t gone anywhere without it since. We’ve been quite a few places and explored some pretty amazing locations. I guess nothing lasts forever, I just wasn’t quite ready to see it go, not before 200,000 miles anyway. It was so close!

I have been combing the internet for possible fixes and I may have actually come across some solutions, it’s just a matter of determining what I want to try to do. For now, I am going to hang it up and give it a rest, do some thinking, and continue logging miles with our other GPS. Maybe I’ll even look into getting another GPS with a few more features – but I’ll wait until I find a good deal – for now, it’s nice just to have a similar GPS in hand to keep me going in the right direction.

Until again

-=Nolan=-