I still cling to my folding accordion style maps and am grateful to AAA for still printing them. There is nothing more powerful than finding destination, mapping it out and then folding the map the correct way! Call me old-fashion, but when I use a map, I feel like a modern day Vasco da Gama. I did get slightly lost recently when a road was under construction and the detour was not on the printed map. For a moment or two, I wished I had a GPS. Therefore, I am considering purchasing one as a back-up plan. My only wish is that is comes with a dreamy Antonio Bandera voice to smoothly navigate me around the detours!

The first GPS I got my hands-on was the type that you had to load on your laptop and attach an external "satellite" antennae to it. To use it, I needed a co-pilot that was willing to keep the laptop on their lap. The trick was to let it guide us to our destination - it was probably a Starbucks or Panera we could use to test wireless connectivity. Anyhow, as long as the batteries lasted we could easily navigate anywhere we needed to go. Once the satellite triangulation was figured out, there was no problem with knowing where you were. Except, the first time the satellites told me I was in the middle of Long Island Sound, south of Connecticut somewhere. I certainly was not on a boat so I had to calibrate the possition by figuring out the logitud and latitude of my current location. I can't even remember the software but I think it was from Microsoft. A year later I received a second-hand Garmin with a tiny 2" screen. Big move from having to haul a large 14.1" laptop that to moodern standards is a door stopper, the tiny contraption was much better and easier to use than the software based one.
Our first test was a short trip to a local apple orchard in October. My wife who distrutst computers and anything else electronic - except the cable box - used a printed map she got from a flyer. I programmed the address and within a minute I had a route traced that told me what time to expect to reach my destination. With that I started following the voice telling me where to merge and where to exit. My wife followed each sign on the road like a hawk. When I passed the exit the print-out said to use, she went nuts and told everyone in the car to "be quiet" (not necessarily using those words - she is high strung). She was concerned that the machine was taking us across the state and perhaps we'd be forever lost, after all, we missed the exit printed on the ad. I was calm and had no reason to go back so I just followed the voice. Not the GPS voice, but the one in my head telling me to just go with my hunch that the GPS really knows where we are going. Sure enough it let us off the highway a few minutes later, through a local town onto a different rural highway. Next it told us to turn into a driveway where there seemed to be no cars. That driveway took us all the way to the front of the line and got ahead what seemed at least 20 cars on the oposite lane trying to get in.
What a sigh of relief, I thought to myself, I have proved myself and technology right this one time. My wife quietly put the ad in the glove compartment and turned around to the kids - "We're here!".