trusting GPS

Until we traded in our car last October, I had never owned a car that had GPS. Being an old fashioned girl that can read a map, I am skeptical about this 'new-fangled' stuff, but around Taranaki, we don't have a lot of need for it.

On our trip south, even though we had maps, we got GPS with the rental car that is held onto the windshield windscreen with a suction cup and Hubby was fine to rely on the GPS to get us where we were going. I'm not sure how it determines which road to show us, but the fact that 4 out of 5 times, it asked if we were ok with unpaved roads was interesting, even though I know that dirt roads are part of living in New Zealand.

We had just left Moeraki and Hubby asked for directions to Lawrence as a point in the general direction we were headed. We turned onto a dirt road and I didn't think much about it. But it went on and on. And turned onto another dirt road. After a while we were crossing this crazy looking bridge that I thought was crossing a river but later learned it was across a lake.

On two of the posts along the bridge, we saw copies of this reward poster. When you read the fine print, you learn that it was a replica of a local poster from 1865.

Then it was on to yet another dirt road!

Now, as we are traveling along, I'm sure this is not a well-traveled road because the livestock--mostly sheep--is spooked by our arrival next to their paddocks. One or two are startled and they cause a panic across the whole group of animals.

We also noticed other cars with the suction cup on the front window and realized that they are doing the same thing--relying on GPS. The conclusion we came to is that the district might end up paving these dirt roads if they are going to have so much traffic stirring up so much dust!

I'm pretty sure that we were given the 'shortest' route as opposed to the 'fastest' route but that's ok because we were on vacation  holiday and it really didn't matter. We saw parts of the country that we would never had seen otherwise.