Get Lost… Never!

My wife and I with our two kids have been living in Dubai for close to a decade. Though I’ve been driving in Dubai all the while, when we first planned an international trip to Mauritius, we decided to play it safe and hired a taxi instead of renting a car. But our next trip was a much bigger one to Europe across four countries. This time we said we need to experience driving in Europe and hence started looking at options to rent a car.

The price range for car rental is directly proportional to the type of the car you choose and the various features that you want in the car. Lesser the add-ons, better it is for your budget. One of the most obvious features you need while driving in a new geography is the help of a map. With technology so advanced and super capable mobile phones, we were quite confident that we’ll use Google Maps on our mobile phones to navigate anywhere around Europe. Hence we ruled out the need to get a car with GPS which would’ve added to the cost anyways.

Shortly after this, we landed in Stuttgart in Germany, from where we’d planned to hire the car. Fortunately we got a free upgrade to a Ford C-Max from a VW Golf we booked initially. It took a while for us to locate the car in the multi-storey parking facility nearby. As soon as we found the car and got in, we realized that the upgrade came with a GPS connectivity as well. But since our trust on technology and mobile phones was far better than this ‘old world navigation system’ we didn’t even bother to turn on the GPS.

Sure enough, Google Map on our mobile started directing us out of the parking lot of the building and showed the duration as an hour and forty minutes to Black Forest. I was quite thrilled to drive in Europe for the first time and soon reached the first set of traffic lights.

That’s when it happened. Google Maps went dead! The last thing we expected to happen in Europe was losing the network on the phones. We were lost!

We’re left in absolute darkness about which way to proceed. The traffic lights soon turned green and since I had to move the car, I took a left turn and followed the traffic till we reached the next traffic lights. That’s when it dawned on to us. There is a silent saviour in our car. The one who we discarded as ‘old world’. We switched on the good old GPS and that was our moment of redemption.

From that instant onwards, if there was one thing we never let go during the entire trip was our trust on GPS. With this good old saviour, rest assured that you’ll never get lost!

Always ensure that you get a car with a GPS and enjoy absolute peace of mind!