I have children. Yes, I do. I love them to pieces but taking them from Point A to Point B, if such points are over an hour away in distance, tends to demand large quantities of painkillers, Zen breathing and extraordinary self control.
You see, kids may be wonderful creatures but they are also infinitely impatient and tend to need things just when you can’t give them those particular things. This is never more relevant that when you are on a long journey to visit relatives or go on a much-needed holiday.
You’ll have just turned onto the highway, not a rest stop in sight for another 20 miles, and they’ll need to go to the loo, or they’ll spill whatever they are drinking all over themselves and scream as if the seven hounds of hell are gnawing on their ankles.
You can’t just stop the car, sort them out, and keep going. No, you have to somehow magically dry them off or get them sorted without taking your hands off the wheel or your eyes off the road. Us parents are amazingly adaptable creatures but we aren’t superhuman.
Which is why you simply cannot go on a driving adventure of any kind without GPS. You can’t. No, this doesn’t mean that your amazing traditional map reading skills are rubbish, or that I am a technology junkie with no shame. It means that if you have a toilet emergency on the M25 you can pull off at the next exit without getting lost in the bowels of some strange suburban area that has no road names.
Instead, you can casually take the next offramp and get instant directions to the nearest toilet. You can then navigate your way out of the garage and back onto the highway without having to ask the nearest dodgy chap on the street corner, or yell at your partner for not being fast enough with the map.
That’s the other reason why you need satnav as a family. Marriage. There is not one couple in existence (at least as far as I know) that has not had a screaming match in the car because someone read the directions incorrectly. Or didn’t tell them to turn soon enough. Or had the map upside down (no sexist remarks about THAT please).
Honestly, how the world survived before GPS beats me. I bet cavemen and women had enormous arguments about which dirt mound they were supposed to turn at because, “Do you have any idea what the turning range on a team of oxen is? Do you? I have to start turning this cart ten minutes before we need to go left! Why didn’t you TELL me to turn left at that anthill?!” Stone wheels can’t have had much spin in them either…
The moral of the story is this. Get satnav before Half-term gets you. If you need some ideas then just eyeball the Garmin-ASUS phones to start with, honestly you will thank me when you get there with your eardrums and nervous system intact.
Tamsin