Our recent trip to IKEA (Toulouse) for bathroom items gave us a good opportunity to use a Tomtom we are trialling. Tomtom is one brand of a satnav (or navigation by satellite) apparatus. I left the programming up to Wouter. The apparatus belongs to a friend of ours, so we only had to set the route. The instruction booklets for these things are as long as your arm, but Wouter did a good job with no previous knowledge.
The voice is 'Brendan', a bloke with a lovely Irish lilt. There is no 'top of the morning to you' when you turn it on, or 'begorra' if you make a mistake. He's quite clear with his instructions, like:
"in 400 meters, cross the roundabout, take the second exit"
The satnav shows you the current speed limit and your current speed. When your speed exceeds the current limit by more than 5km, there is a 'moo' to remind you to slow down. We had only been through 2 villages and already had 4 moos! I wasn't driving.
Wouter had set the route to go from home via Mirepoix - this was a mistake as we were only skirting the town and not going into the town centre. We found out if we didn't follow Brendan's instructions, for the next 20 minutes or so, he kept trying to get us to turn around, turn right or left, but he just wanted us to go back and via the centre of Mirepoix at every possible opportunity. A trap for young players. Now we know we must find a very small village to travel 'via' as you drive through the centre when travelling on the main road and that will keep Brendan happy.
So some more programming needed to get out of this cycle and stop Brendan complaining and give us directions for our desired route. This meant I had to try and figure it out as we drove and I had never looked at one of these before. I managed to programme in 'Toulouse, avoiding motorways', even though we would not go to the centre of Toulouse, but it would be enough to get us to where we were going.
Happy enough we were getting good instructions, the mooing continued so I just looked at Wouter who had the grace to laugh a little (finally caught and he can't argue with the computer). A little further on we were behind another vehicle and both cars driving at a good rate when suddenly speedy gonzales came up from behind and overtook the both of us with incredible speed. Wouter started mooing like mad. It was hilarious. Obviously that guy did not have a mooing satnav and I had no idea Wouter could do such impressive barnyard noises!
We decided to use it again on the way home - it was dark and foggy and was also the end of rush hour - and it did help us find our way out of the city rabbit warren. Once you know what you are doing with the satnav, how to programme it with accuracy, how to drive to the comments, how to read the screen, it makes driving in unknown territory much less stressful.
