Perhaps the greatest difficulty travellers have when driving in a strange country or city is navigation.
How does one get from the Bombay Hills to Eden Park in one piece?
From the Boulevard Peripherique to the Champs Elysees without a divorce?
Dare you take on the traffic in inner-city London, or should you park at Oxford station and train in?
Been there, done that; and driven to and through the centres of Sydney, Melbourne, Istanbul, Teheran, New Delhi, Bombay and worse.
So, I reckon I'm sufficiently qualified to claim that a global positioning system (GPS) device is the best thing to have struck motoring in strange places since the invention of the wheel.
My wife and I picked up a hire car at Frankfurt Airport, Germany, at 6.30am one Sunday.
We were heading northeast to Erfurt, then further on to Colditz Castle in Saxony and eventually to the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Austria and back to Germany.
No set routes or destinations; just 26 days of stop-and-go touring as the fancy took us.
We've got around this way overseas for years, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I'm the driver but we decide between us where to stop and where to go.
Navigation on the move is a fraught business.
Judi is the first to acknowledge she is not the world's greatest navigator, nor does she enjoy the role.
This time, however, our car came with a built-in GPS.
Yes, the young woman at the Europcar counter assured us, the comprehensive map in the GPS covered all the countries we intended to visit, and yes, it could be switched to English.
No, she couldn't leave her counter to show us how it worked; but yes, there would be a parking attendant where the rental cars were who could demonstrate that immediately.
Well, no, she was wrong.
There was no parking attendant among the hundreds and hundreds of rental cars in the bowels of the airport; it must be too early in the morning.
How would we find our little Nissan Micra down here, let along how GPS works?
German efficiency with signage and numbers prevailed in locating the car; but how does one fire up the GPS, let alone operate it?
Simple, we found, after we and Zorro (well, the car was small, black with silver highlights and no slug) emerged from the airport's bowels into near-daylight.
Push the appropriate button and follow the instructions.
Within a few minutes we were in English, had punched in "Erfurt" and "Quickest route", had listened to a slightly-accented husky female voice advise she was "Preparing the route", then that we should "Follow the road until further instructions".
This we did for the next 26 glorious, wonderful, argument-free days.
"Marlene", as we quickly called the voice, for obvious reasons, was simply magnificent.
She took us down all the byways we wanted, off the highways and auto-routes, into the very centre of any villages and hamlets and towns that we thought we'd like to see, plus some cities big and huge, right into the "zentrums" and out again, advised us when route changes were coming up, warned us of traffic hazards and one-way streets, dead ends and petrol stations, even locating toilets for us at times, never once losing her cool or her knowledge of where we were, and making the whole business of driving through eastern Europe simple and relaxing.
Sensational!
We learnt a few tricks about Marlene-management, like setting 50km or 100km destinations rather than those 400km away, and then setting new destinations, so that we kept clear of most big cities and toll routes (although she could be programmed to avoid them herself).
We also learnt not to get upset when she gently remonstrated: "When possible, make a U-turn", signifying I'd missed an off-ramp or turn-off or made some similar driving error.
Within a few hundred metres, Marlene would advise she had prepared another route, and direction and sanity would be saved.
Had there been an instruction book (in English), or had the rental-car attendant been at work that Sunday morning, I might have become even more efficient in using Marlene's manifold talents.
No doubt there are things that a GPS can do that I don't even know about.
But I do know this.
Any further foreign car touring that we are fortunate enough to do - or even driving in relatively foreign Wellington or Auckland - will be made with the invaluable assistance of GPS.
Don't leave home without one.
