Adding to Alex's comments....Here is our new travel companion Lucy. Never had a GPS before (in Winnipeg I'm not sure what exactly you would use one for!) but am very excited about this new toy ( I mean tool). Driving here is a little complicated and while Alex is a top notch navigator, she also likes to sleep and well, kind-of wander off in the car.
Driving at home was a lot of straight lines and traffic lights. Here, there are plenty of curves in the roads (not exactly sure why....seems they add curves wherever they can. The grid plan seems to not have appealed to early planners and this tradition has been carried on to today. Back at home, driving was basically the following: "Take Street A....follow it for around 10 minutes. Turn left on Street B, follow it for 5 minutes....then turn right on Street C and it's the fifth on the left." Pretty straight forward.
My initial impression of what the same journey here might be is..... Take Street A for 2 minutes....at the roundabout, take the 3rd exit....keep straight for 3 minutes, bear right...at the roundabout take the 1st exit....continue for 5 minutes....at the roundabout take the 2nd exit (ie...keep going straight after going half-way around the roundabout...) continue straight...etc...etc.....Tricky...but not too bad if you get it all right the first time around.
If you get off track though (which as you are going through roundabouts every couple of minutes can be easy to do), it can get a lot more confusing. On the way to the grocery store the other day things didn't go the way we saw them happening on the map (for some reason there was a no right turn....) anyway, it took us about 1/2 hour to actually get to the parking lot for a building we could see.
So, now we have Lucy. On her first day out she performed very well and got us flawlessly to where we wanted to go. On the way back however, I though that I would change the 'preferences' on the unit and request the 'shortest route' vs. the 'fastest route". It was funny actually....I don't mind 'shortcuts', but Alex is not quite as comfortable. The shortcut started out OK...small but OK. and then the roads just kept getting smaller and smaller. Finally we were on what you can see in Alex's picture where it was a lane about the width of the car with walls of tress/ shrubs / bushes on either side. Good practice for me driving on the right side of the car, as for some reason I've had a tendency to drift over to the left. Not possible on these roads as you'd run into the wall of shrubbery.
Here is a Google map link to the trip from yesterday. Never used the "My Maps" function on Google, so we'll see how that goes.
Cheers.
Scott.
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