Grandma and the GPS

My sister offered to bring her Garmin GPS thingy on our road-trip to Oklahoma City this past weekend. It was pretty helpful, especially when we were wanting to find out how far to the next McDonald's (many reasons why that was a good place for a car load of 2 seventy-somethings, 2 girls in the the "new" twenties, and a baby).

So then when my sister flew the coop (literally . . . she and her baby took an airplane home), she left us with the Garmin. I was driving away from the airport in OKC, asking my dad (who grew up there and also had just picked up a new map of the city) how to get to the interstate, and my mom was in the back seat figuring out how to use the GPS!

Now, with all respect to my mom (and I think she would concur that I am being factual), she is not the most tech-savvy. She has, in the past, had trouble programming the VCR and has limited technical know-how. But let me just say that she was awesome in how she figured out how to program the Garmin! She turned it on and somehow got to the screen where you type in the destination, which this time happened to be her brother's house in Memphis, TN. Her only little glitch was that when she would try to type in his street name, "Cheval", the Garmin was trying to be smart and kept inputting "Chevy Chase." Once she showed the Garmin who was the boss, it straightened up and gave us what we needed to know.

Of course, then I had to listen to "the lady" tell me insistently to "turn left in .3 miles," but it was very helpful to have a little crutch to rely on when we needed to veer off the well-beaten path of Interstate 40. Except when we decided to take a detour to drive through my dad's college campus. Or when Ms. Garmin told us that there was a Chick-Fil-A on the right, but there wasn't.

I asked my mom if she'd like to have a GPS of her own. Before she could answer, my dad piped in, "I already have a lady's voice that tells me what to do!" We got a great chuckle out of that! The next day, after I got back in the car after pumping gas, my mom told me that the Garmin had switched to a man's voice that morning. I didn't immediately clue in to her reference to the fact that my dad had been telling me which way to turn for a few minutes, but once I did, I got another chuckle.

I'm glad to know that my mom is not too stuck in her ways to learn a new trick or two every once in a while. I think she might need a Garmin of her own one day!